Retired members of the Nigeria Police Force and their relatives on Monday obstructed a gate at the Presidential Villa in Abuja while protesting their continued placement under the Contributory Pension Scheme (CPS).
The demonstrators, operating under the umbrella of the Police Retired Officers Forum of Nigeria (PROF), labelled the scheme as “fraudulent, illegal, inhumane, and obnoxious,” and urged President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to sign the Police Exit Bill into law.
According to the retirees, the legislation—approved by the National Assembly on December 4, 2025, and forwarded to the Presidency on March 16, 2026—would remove police personnel from the CPS once enacted.
Heading the protest, the National Coordinator of PROF, CSP Raphael Irowainu (retd.), explained that the rally was intended to press the president to take action on the bill.
“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 expressed concern that although other security agencies have been excluded from the scheme, police officers are still part of it.
“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.
The retirees maintained that the CPS has negatively impacted their welfare, describing it as a “slavery and untimely death-inducing pension scheme.”
Monday’s protest is not the first instance of retired police officers demonstrating over the issue. In July 2025, retirees held a similar protest at the National Assembly, calling for their removal from the scheme.
Some of the protesters, many of whom are elderly, also gathered at the Force Headquarters in Abuja, lamenting what they termed poor pension conditions under the CPS.
The recent protest highlights increasing frustration among retired police personnel over pension policies and their exclusion from benefits granted to other security agencies.
