Police Retirees Call CPS ‘Slavery’ as Tinubu Faces Pressure

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Police Retirees Call CPS ‘Slavery’ as Tinubu Faces Pressure

Retired police officers are urging Tinubu to scrap the CPS, citing poverty, delayed benefits and a pending exit bill after fresh protests.

Atlantic Post

April 20, 2026

3–5 minutes

Bola Tinubu, Contributory Pension Scheme, Nigeria Police Pension, Pension Reform, Police Retirees, Police Welfare

Retired Police Officers Turn Pension Anger Into A Direct Challenge To Tinubu

Retired police officers have escalated their long-running revolt against Nigeria’s Contributory Pension Scheme, blocking a gate at the Presidential Villa in Abuja and demanding that President Bola Tinubu sign the Police Exit Bill into law.

The protesters, under the Police Retired Officers Forum of Nigeria, described the scheme as “fraudulent”, “inhumane” and a “slavery and untimely death-inducing pension scheme”, turning a welfare grievance into a blunt political challenge at the heart of the presidency.

At the centre of the outcry is the claim that years of service have ended in penury for many retired officers.

One protester, a retired DSP who said she left service in 2024, complained that the system is “contributory slavery” and asked why a former officer could be left with about ₦30,000 a month in the present economy.

She said retirees can no longer comfortably afford food, healthcare, children’s school fees or even routine medication, framing the issue as a dignity crisis rather than a narrow pension dispute.

The anger is not isolated. TheCable and Punch reported that the Villa protest was led by Raphael Irowainu, the forum’s national coordinator and a retired chief superintendent of police, who said the aim was to force presidential assent to the Police Exit Bill.

According to both reports, the bill was passed by the National Assembly on 4 December 2025 and transmitted to the Presidency on 16 March 2026.

The retirees insist that if soldiers, the SSS, the Air Force, the Navy and the NIA have been removed from the scheme, police officers should not remain trapped in it.

This is where the policy fault line becomes unavoidable. PenCom defines the CPS as a scheme in which employer and employee both contribute a portion of monthly emoluments into a Retirement Savings Account, with the funds privately managed by Pension Fund Administrators under the custody of Pension Fund Custodians.

PenCom also says the CPS was established by the 2004 Pension Reform Act and re-enacted in 2014. In other words, the system the retirees are attacking is not an informal arrangement but the core architecture of Nigeria’s modern pension framework.

Yet the police grievance has persisted because the CPS has not convinced many retirees that it protects them in old age.

PenCom’s own FAQ says an RSA is meant to provide retirement or terminal benefits, while a retiree can access it only at retirement, loss of job, medical incapacity or death.

That design is meant to guarantee discipline and funding, but police retirees argue that the practical outcome for many of them is far less dignified than the policy promise.

Their language is telling. They are not merely asking for a better formula. They are demanding a separate structure altogether.

The political context matters too. PenCom said in June 2025 that monthly pensions under the CPS were increased from ₦8.3 billion to ₦11.9 billion, affecting more than 233,000 retirees, and it also announced work on a gratuity scheme for federal civil servants under the CPS.

Separately, PenCom said the Federal Government released ₦14.92 billion for accrued rights covering arrears for CPS retirees.

Those moves show that the pension architecture is being adjusted at the edges, but the police agitation suggests that incremental reform is no longer enough for a group that believes it has been structurally disadvantaged for years.

There is also a legislative reality behind the drama. The National Assembly order paper in 2025 carried a bill to establish a Nigerian Police Force Pension Board and exempt the force from the CPS, confirming that the exemption campaign had already moved from street protest to parliamentary business.

That matters because it weakens the argument that the retirees are merely making emotional demands. Their cause has already been translated into legislative language, and now they are pressing Tinubu to act on it.

The larger national security question is not difficult to see. A police force that spends decades enforcing order should not be left with a retirement system that its own pensioners openly describe as unbearable.

Whether or not the government ultimately restores the older police pension board model, the current standoff exposes a deeper failure in welfare planning for Nigeria’s security personnel.

When elderly retirees feel compelled to block the Villa gate and plead that they are “dying” and “have no food to eat”, the issue is no longer just pensions. It is trust, morale and the state’s moral contract with the people it asks to serve.

For Tinubu, the choice now is politically sensitive and symbolically loaded. Signing the Police Exit Bill would hand the retirees a victory and possibly calm a recurring protest movement. Delaying it may deepen the perception that the police, unlike other security agencies, are being left behind in retirement.

Either way, the message from Abuja is unmistakable: the pension row has become a live test of how this administration treats the men and women who guarded the country for decades.