…seeks policies to protect their rights

By Starrys Obazei

A non-governmental organisation, ‘The Senior Citizens Care Foundation,’ has berated the three tiers of government over their insensitive attitude towards the plight of the elderly in the society.

A press statement made available to journalists in Lagos by the foundation’s national coordinator, Mr. Jide Taiwo and a member of the management executive and the corporate communications adviser, Princelyn Oduenyi, lamented the ill-treatment the society has continually meted out to the senior citizens, who due to age, are now very fragile and vulnerable to such inhuman treatments of constant abuses, exploitations and in some cases outright killings by those expected to protect them.

Oduenyi and Taiwo admonished the three tiers of government to always see it as a point of duty to ensure that retirees, who have dutifully and sincerely committed a greater part of their youth in serving their fatherland are not abandoned in their old age or at their point of need.

Both men insisted that senior citizens should be taken care of and their emoluments must be paid promptly to enable them meet up their various responsibilities as parents and grandparents while also enabling them continue to take care of their old age, and not in penury as is always the case in Nigeria.

The acceptable standard as enshrined in the charter of the World Assembly on Ageing over three decades ago, they said, must also be the standard here.

The foundation, they said, had asked her legal team to formally write the Edo State government, the Inspector General of Police and the Edo State Commissioner of Police to know the extent government had gone on recent unfortunate incidents in the state where for example, a young tenant snuffed the life out of his 83-year-old landlord simply because the old man wanted to know why this young man had decided not to pay his rent since 2014, despite the fact that he was still holding in his possession the said apartment.

And the most recent involved the gruesome murder of a 65-year-old grandmother, Mrs. Clara Uwaifo, a retired headmistress, perpetrated by whom police described as a teenage cultist and serial killer.