The minister of aviation and aerospace development, Festus Keyamo, has said that President Bola Tinubu is clearing unpaid pensions and gratuities owed to former workers of the Nigeria Airways following the airline’s liquidation in September 2004, when Atiku Abubakar was vice-president.
Keyamo made the remark while reacting to a statement by Atiku, presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), who blamed the Tinubu administration for the rising cost of living in Nigeria.
Atiku accused Tinubu of implementing economic policies that have made the country more expensive for businesses and households, promising to reverse the trend if elected president.
Responding to Atiku’s statement in a post on X, Keyamo accused the former VP of hypocrisy, alleging that the Olusegun Obasanjo administration, in which Atiku served as vice-president, liquidated the national carrier and left thousands of workers without their pensions and gratuities.
“To add salt into their wounds, you refused to pay them their pensions and gratuities, running into billions of Naira,” the minister said.
“Twenty-two years later, after many of them have died out of frustration, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu @officialABAT is now clearing the mess you left behind.”
He said Tinubu approved and released N36 billion more than a month ago to settle the outstanding benefits and being succour to the affected families.
According to Keyamo, the former workers have started receiving payment alerts, while their union recently gave Tinubu an award in recognition of the intervention.
“Yet you sit down there and pontificate? It’s only the younger ones who don’t know your history you can attempt to hoodwink, but we will expose you to them. You cannot disguise your inordinate ambition in a cloud of rhetorical gibberish,” he said.
“When it is convenient for you, you claim some credit of the Obasanjo-Atiku government and when not convenient, you say Obasanjo was in charge and not you as Vice-President. The proper posturing of a con artist!”
The Federal Government had concluded payment of outstanding severance benefits to 2,100 former workers of Nigeria Airways Limited, more than two decades after the national carrier was liquidated.
