By Chigozie Kelvin
For one who doesn’t have a clue on how the Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate (PTAD) was transformed by the pioneer Executive Secretary /Director General Mrs. Nellie Mayshak would tend to believe the malicious claims by some persons that they cleaned the mess in the agency.
The transformation of PTAD wouldn’t have been possible without Mrs Mayshak , an internationally acclaimed technocrat. Nigerians seem to forget so soon the Abdulrasheed Maina saga when he headed the agency known then as Presidential Task Team on Pension Reform (PTTPR) and how pensioners were dying without getting a dime from the organization. The then administration of President Jonathan, in search of a solution to address the problem bedeviling pensioners under the Defined Benefits Scheme, invited Mayshak who was doing well in her career overseas; she was appointed the pioneer head of the agency.
After a holistic review of the challenges confronting the scheme, she warned it was not going to be business as usual.
Being a renowned technocrat, she brought to bare her expertise to build an institution that is today the envy of others.
It was Mrs Nellie Mayshak who digitalized the old pension scheme for effective service delivery to ensuring seamless payment of pensioners and also brought transparency into the system. PTAD under her watch leveraged on technology to get database of pensioners, which helped the agency, know the actual number of pensioners thus removing many ghost pensioners from the system. The facts are there for everyone to see.
Mayshak was accused of fraud because she refused to allow the few cabal who have seen pension fund as their milking cow to have their ways. She introduced the biometric verification and the digitization of the database and the whole process which resulted in removal of thousands of ghost pensioners.
Perhaps it is said that ‘If you fight corruption, it fights back’; and that is the whole scenario that led to her suspension an attempt to tarnish her image in the international community.
The questions begging for answers are:
1. The Minister of finance after her probe till date found it very difficult to make public the outcome of the probe panel.
2. Why disengage her through a secret letter?
It is laughable that after realizing that Mayshak is innocent of all the accusations labeled against her till today the government is silent on her case of victimization. It is just a common sense after accusing her wrongly to also apologies publicly after the probe that found her not guilty of all she was accused of.
Why am particular saying Federal Government should apologies to Mrs. Nellie Mayshak is to set the records straight. There were lots of persons fighting her on the pages of newspaper then. The then Acting DG in a desperate attempt to take credit from Mayshak’s effort told some journalists that “Before I took over, we had a lot of issues. In fact, I have the personal experience of my uncle who applied for over two years and they were asking him to wait for clarification but when I took over and based on that experience, I found out that the problem is that of records.”
“There have been no additional funds released to us. We make the savings from ghost manes we have been able to remove from the payroll. In one particular week; we closed about 800 different accounts in one day from various banks which we passed to ICPC for investigation.
Mr Oluwatoyin was then barely six months in PTAD and has done nothing rather than inflating the PTAD payroll . It is on record that Mayshak has zero tolerance for corruption when she was piloting the affaires of PTAD. A lot of pensioners and public affairs analysts have said that Mayshak’s suspension was a deliberate plot against the DG by those who couldn’t have the opportunity to dip their hands into pensioners funds because she had blocked all the loopholes.
It is just morally proper to apologies to this international technocrat whom all her life was to serve humanity and to the best ability of her professionalism, she did well.

Mrs. Nellie Mayshak, he who laughs last laughs the best. wish you all the best Ma

Kelvin is a social media analyst, based in Awka, Anambra state, Nigeria