OPEN LETTER TO GOVERNOR ROCHAS OKOROCHA
By Ebubechukwu Ibecheozor.
Dear, Rochas Okorocha.

First of all, I plead with your patience to accommodate my audacity to address you without the cherished title ‘His Excellency’. It was borne out of the fact that it conflicts with the most basic virtue, honesty. For someone who is hardly excellent, I dare not venture to address him as ‘His Excellency’. All things being equal, let us abandon unpleasant pleasantries and move into the real reason for this angry essay.
Recently, your media aide Sam Onwuemeodo made a preposterous, hare-brained and asinine press statement on your behalf. Acknowledging the receipt of 7 billion Paris club refund. In that atrocious hogwash of a Statement, you boastfully informed us that you would employ the money in clearing the outstanding pensions, having cleared previous arrears up till December 2016. A monumental obliquity extremely liable to be overlooked or undetected by unsuspecting innocent citizens.
I cannot soil my obviously limited intellectual space with an isolated response which mind end up serving little purpose every time you send your lousy, rotten, unpopular, floundering and maladroit media aides or their unimaginative rabble-rousing co-travellers to make a statement. But the least I can do is invest just a solitary hour of my life to clarify those words of exceeding deception and plethoric falsity.
I will like to state as a matter of cold fact that you never cleared any pension arrears up to December 2016. This is tragic invention of the evil genius in you fabricated to wag the dog and no one the wiser. Of course there is nothing breaking about this news to pensioners or anybody abreast with the proceedings of the singular affair involving you and the pensioners. I am only taking the liberty of pointing out the veiled half-truths for the benefit of those who are unfortunately at the mercy of every yarn you spin.
Lie number one:
It is on record that you manufactured an insufferable, abominable, shameless and illegal piece of document which you called indemnity form. A document forcing old vulnerable people to involuntarily relinquish more than half of their pension arrears or forfeit their entire entitlement. Arrears which amounted to at least 23 months in the mildest of cases were stated as 11. With a cocktail abuse of power and unclad reckless disregard for law, you wrote off at least 13 months of the old men’s pittance. Dangling 11 months to them on a take it or leave it basis. Of course, their near fatal financial state won the battle for you. You won them with starvation. Mr Okorocha, you never cleared any pension, you wrote it off emperor style. For once sir, say the truth.
We are also aware that the industrial court in Owerri declared that abominable piece of illegal security null and void and of no effect. So as of now, you owe every pensioner in Imo State at least 13 months before 2017.In addition to 7 months in 2017.
As supremely evil as robbing them off 13 months was, It wasn’t the biggest taboo that occurred. The remaining 11 months was slashed by 60 percent. This implied that you paid 40 percent of 11 months. How remarkably evil. This meant that a pensioner who receives 1000 thousand naira a month. His arrears of 23 months will amount to 2.3 million naira. With the fiendish write-off, he will get 40 percent of 100 thousand, which is 40 thousand, Naira. 11 months will equate to 440 thousand Naira. I still don’t know if there is any connection between 440 thousand and 2.3 million. Yet, your integrity challenged multiloquent rascal media aide had the moral courage to aide in you such hideous misinformation. Mr Rochas Okorocha, we are not fools. For once say the truth.

Lie number two.

May I remind you that along with your take it or leave threat also came a promise. A promise that from January 2017, pensions will be paid as at when due. A promise which you informed your self-acclaimed born again press aide to inform us was ‘’kept at abeyance following the steady and disturbing increase in the number of Pensioners and the amount involved worrisomely snowballing to more than N1.5billion even when some states with more population density pay about N500million as Pensions’
I've never seen Sam Onwuemodo as someone capable of delicate finesse in the art of covering up his paymaster’s fecal mess. But to sling our common sense with an atrociously puerile and offhand statement is a grave indictment on his aptitude for whatever you pay him for. But alas, he was speaking for you; you most likely gave him those reasons. According to you through him, Imo State pension bill has risen from 350 million to over 1.5 billion since you came into power.
First of all, let me assure you with due respect that you are talking nonsense. If I may ask, when did this mysterious multiplicity occur? Between December you made the promise and January you smashed it? Did you not take cognizance of this imaginary statistics before you broke their hands and made away with their entitlement promising to be regular from this year? You claim that states with higher population pay around 500 million in pensions monthly. For once, you actually are speaking some truth whilst being exceedingly frugal and economical with it. As it is said, a liar is a liar but one who speaks portions of the truth in order to deceive is a craftsman of destruction.
How can you claim Imo State pay over 1 billion naira more than more populated states? Even if Imo State has the highest number of government employees and consequently, retirees. How did the bill grow from 350 million to 1.5 billion in so short a period? These are questions you need to employ your statements in addressing. But of course compulsive Pseudologia Fantastica is a complex psychological condition to explain and a finer specimen has never walked on earth.
Sir, allow access to pensioner’s information so that the truth can come out.

Lie number 3.
Before I go ahead to point out to you the last but by no measure the least lie in your lie ridden statement. Let me be the first to assure you that you are not as smart as you think you are. It is an easy deduction to make from your comments and actions that you think yourself to be a man of superior intelligence and mental craft. You presume yourself to be smart and clever; hence you assume you can easily manipulate any situation to your desired shape. It is a cute thing to flatter oneself every now and then.
I hate to be a bearer of bad news but sir, all things being equal, you are suffering from huge self-deception. A classic example of the Dunning-Krugger effect. A psychological condition that makes people feel they are smarter than they actually are. Making them exhibit heavy cognitive bias and illusory superiority. It makes one unable to realize his own ineptitude. In fact, the exact intelligence required to detect this is the exact one you are lacking. That is why a self-acclaimed stock broker who makes predictions with a lounging air of superiority keeps losing money left and right.
This explains why you put forward a poorly constructed, multiple lose ended lies and expect people to believe it. A fatal stage of Dunning-Krugger effect and its accompanying tomfoolery. And there is nothing as unaesthetic and unpleasant as the sight of a man fooling himself without a hint of it.

I promised to unveil the last lie in your multiple lie embedded statement. Unlike you, I keep promises. In announcing your plans to spend our own share of the Paris Club refund on so noble a thing as clearing 2017 pension arrears, you stated that pensioners will undergo another stage of verification. This is to checkmate the imaginary multiplicity you claimed. When I said this might be the last but not the least lie, I meant every word of it. In the last two years, pensioners have undergone at least 5 different verifications. It might be easily conjectured that you deliberately punish senior citizens with this inhuman process just to bargain more time, an unclad delay tactics. But even as wicked as that may seem, I dare to say that’s not all to it. You have used that manual, archaic, obsolete and mundane verification tool to delist so many legitimate pensioners from pay list. It is a verifiable fact that when names are published after each round of your so called verification exercise, cries echoed in every local government. Great mass of men and women who participated in your hellish exercise fail to see their names on the list of those to be paid. People whose body evidence can serve as empirical evidence against any suspicion of ghost pensioner. Yet, after depleting the bill through illegal means, you come open in broad daylight to claim a bloated wage bill. Sir, how do you sleep at night? For once, say the truth.

Sir, we challenge you to publish a list of all verified pensioners. Is it an infinite number that you cannot mention a specific number? Give us a number, just a number. Let our imagination do the rest.

Putting into consideration that most of Imo State pensioners were Civil Servants and teachers. You might not know that we know that very few Civil Servants attain Level 16 position before retirement. We also know that the current wage structure implies that a retired level 16 officer will earn around 120 thousand naira or slightly above as pension. Those that retired before the new structure will earn very much less. Of course over 80 percent of living pensioners retired before 2012. We also know and can verify that over 70 percent of that 90 percent that retired before that time didn’t manage achieve level 16. This implies that majority of these pensioners are actually receiving less than 50 thousand naira as monthly pension. I shudder to imagine what kind of mathematics will make that amount gulp almost 2 billion naira monthly. Unless of course, Imo State has a ridiculous amount of living pensioners. A stray information you are laying claim to and yet no attempt to prove it.
Let me give you a little shock sir. It is an affair of little or no challenge to verify the actual number of pensioners you actually paid in your over publicized fake arrears clearance of 2016. All of them were paid through the bank. Consequently, the banks can quickly reveal how many pensioners they paid and we can take up the math from there.
It is clear that your verification serves only an evil purpose to you and overly useless to the pensioner. We challenge you to engage a private organization unanimously chosen by the pensioners to conduct this verification and for once verify the actual number of pensioners. Put a final nail to the coffin of ghost pensioners. Let the truth come out.

Sir, if you would oblige me, I volunteer to do conduct it for you, free of charge. You only pay us with access to every information and structure we need .My fellows and I will get it done within two weeks. In result, we will present an exact number of living pensioners according to their cadre and the corresponding bill. I am willing to do this on one condition; the information will be published on a national daily to avoid future misinformation and unbecoming excuses. Let the whole world know the actual figures. Sir, let the truth be known.

We challenge you to introduce the biometric system for monthly payment. Since you express worry that even dead pensioners are still receiving pension since the creation of Imo State. Isn't it strange that a man who appears modern and lay claims to modernity would want nothing to do with electronic verification? Since you are a huge fan of verification, this is the most accurate of them all. Federal government employ this extremely efficient method in paying Corp Members. It works on pari-passu with the banking system, which automatically yanks off names with no verified prints from payroll.
A beautiful electronic automation highly efficient in exposing various shapes of foul play. It is a common knowledge that no two finger prints are the same. With these you don’t have to worry about ghost pensioners. I have a lurking sneaky suspicion that you won’t like this. For it will reveal the actual number you paid each month. Zero liberty to make clumsy untruthful claims.
Let the truth come out.

As a concerned indigene of Imo State and a good man, I would like to offer plausible advice. The 7 billion you just acknowledged the receipt is enough see through pensions from the Arrears to the remainder of the year. You said it yourself that there is no outstanding debt on regular salaries. And since you are not comfortable with paying pensions with allocations and IGR, this is clearly a windfall that you should spend wisely.

Having said that, I will not be surprised if you throw discretion into wind and squander 7 billion on matters that doesn’t improve the welfare of the senior Citizens or any Imo person. Your fatal habit of squander mania makes it a probable supposition.

It is on record that Imo State received 26.8 billion naira as bailout fund. It is also on record that Imo State is high on the list of ICPC's investigation of misappropriated bailout funds. Thanks to FOI, it is an open secret that only 6 billion out of almost 27 bailout fund billion was disbursed. And most disturbingly, matters unrelated to salaries, the sole purpose of that bailout.
It is also a record that cannot be obliterated that few months ago; Imo State received 13 billion in the first tranche of Paris Club refund. It is worthy of note that Imo State received the highest bailout and Paris Club refund in South East. If these monies can encounter wilderness without a considerable knowledge on their whereabouts, 7 billion is really a paltry sum place hopes on. It is really a rotten habit of indiscretion and terrible imprudence. You can understand I am pretending looting didn’t occur.

Having invested the last one hour of my life pointing out to how shattered your image is. And how you are making no effort in mending the splintered shreds of your reputation. It will be the blackest of denials if I say that your name was never appealing to many. Those days are distant memories now. And clinging to past sentiments tricked us into buying a lemon in 2015. Since then, we have never known a good day. Of course you hardly need us now; you bagged your two terms. But my thousand pities will go to Uche Nwosu whose political image has been smeared by his relationship with you. He can’t complain, he was nothing without you.
We are counting the days down to 2019. Imo people survived worse tribulations, this too shall pass. We will shelter ourselves in the infinite goodness of providence. Hoping that the same justice that most graciously forgive since might also punish it.
The mass has ended.

Your Excellency
Ebubechuckwu Ibecheozor.

Okoroawusa

Rochas is wicked. Gosh