Hundreds of retired officers of the Nigeria Police Force and their families on Monday barricaded one of the gates of the Presidential Villa in Abuja, venting anger over their continued inclusion in the Contributory Pension Scheme (CPS).
The demonstrators, operating under the banner of the Police Retired Officers Forum of Nigeria (PROF), branded the scheme as “fraudulent, illegal, inhumane, and obnoxious.”
They urged President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to immediately sign the long-awaited Police Exit Bill, which seeks to exempt police personnel from the CPS.
According to the group, the bill passed by the National Assembly on December 4, 2025, and forwarded to the Presidency on March 16, 2026 remains unsigned despite repeated appeals.
The retirees insist that the president’s assent is crucial to ending what they describe as years of hardship and neglect.
Leading the protest, CSP Raphael Irowainu (retd.), National Coordinator of PROF, said the march aimed to push the president into action.
“Our major aim here is to prevail on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to sign our bill the bill exiting the police from the Contributory Pension Scheme passed by the National Assembly on 4th December 2025 and transmitted to him on 16th March 2026, into law, nothing more than that,” he said.
Irowainu lamented that while other security agencies had already been removed from the scheme, the police had been left behind.
“The soldiers have been exited, the SSS has been exited, the Air Force has been exited, the Navy has been exited, the National Intelligence Agency has been exited. The police, who are the father of them all, are trapped in this obnoxious Contributory Pension Scheme,” he added.
Many of the elderly protesters carried placards condemning the CPS, which they said had exposed them to severe economic difficulties. The retirees described the scheme as a “slavery and untimely death-inducing pension scheme.”
Monday’s protest follows similar demonstrations in July 2025, when retired police officers marched to the National Assembly and the Force Headquarters in Abuja to demand their removal from the scheme.
Despite their persistence, the retirees say their appeals continue to be ignored, leaving them “frustrated and forgotten” after decades of service.