Retired military officers gathered outside Nigeria’s Ministry of Defence in Abuja on Wednesday to demand pension increases they say the government promised but never paid, prompting a heavy deployment of police, soldiers, immigration officers and vehicle-inspection personnel around the building.
The protest was organized by retired officers who say President Bola Tinubu approved a “consequential adjustment” to military pensions in November 2025 alongside a salary increase for serving personnel, but that the pension component was never implemented. Retired Colonel Innocent Azubike, one of the protest’s organizers, said military authorities publicly thanked Tinubu for the pension gesture at the time but later changed their account of what had been approved. He said the situation grew more urgent after the government announced a second salary increase for active-duty personnel in August, set to take effect in September, without addressing the earlier, unpaid pension adjustment.
Azubike said officials began changing their account of the November approval in July and August, treating the matter as though it “should be forgotten,” and added that funds had been calculated for the new salary increase while the pension component for retirees was left out of that calculation.
Read also: Tinubu Approves 35% Pay Rise For Civil Servants, Pensioners
By 8 a.m., officers from the Nigeria Police Force, the Nigeria Immigration Service and Vehicle Inspection Officers, along with soldiers from the Armed Forces, had taken up positions along roads leading to the ministry. At least two armored personnel carriers and more than 15 additional patrol vehicles were stationed at the site, according to reporters who visited the scene, and the resulting deployment caused traffic congestion around Abuja’s city center. Some accounts of the protest indicated that security personnel blocked the retired officers from reaching the ministry grounds entirely, though the scale of that restriction could not be independently confirmed.
Azubike argued that the pension exclusion would create a two-tier system in which newly retired soldiers draw pensions calculated on the higher, current salary scale while officers who retired earlier continue drawing pensions based on outdated figures, despite holding comparable rank and years of service. He said the retirees are not opposed to pay increases for active personnel but want any salary adjustment matched by a corresponding pension increase for those who already left the service, some after 35 years or more.
Wednesday’s demonstration is not the first time retired officers have confronted the government over stalled pension payments. In 2022, the Retired Members of the Nigerian Armed Forces and the Coalition of Concerned Military Veterans picketed the same ministry over unpaid allowances. In December 2024, military pensioners shut down the Finance Ministry in Abuja over a separate set of unpaid entitlements, with organizers at that protest saying retirees had been told cash disbursement, not approval, was the remaining obstacle, and that a promised November payment date had passed without resolution. Nigeria’s Military Pensions Board has previously attributed some payment delays to processing bottlenecks involving the Central Bank of Nigeria and commercial banks.
The current dispute traces to Tinubu’s approval of a new military salary scale intended to improve morale and operational performance across Nigeria’s various security theatres, including its long-running campaign against Boko Haram and Islamic State-linked insurgents in the northeast. Retired officers argue that because pensions are calculated as a percentage of final salary under Nigerian military pension rules, any salary increase for serving personnel is supposed to trigger an automatic, proportional adjustment for existing pensioners — the adjustment at the center of Wednesday’s protest.
Read also: States Unable To Meet ₦60,000 Wage Demand, Say Governors
Nigeria’s National Assembly passed legislation in October 2025 setting ₦250,000 as the minimum monthly pay for the country’s lowest-ranked soldiers, after lawmakers found Nigeria’s military salaries trailed most other African armed forces; Tinubu assented to that bill in November 2025 and ordered three months of retroactive arrears paid alongside it, according to reporting at the time. A second, larger pay revision this August raised salaries by 30 to 80 percent across roughly 250,000 active-duty personnel, with the steepest increase going to privates and staff sergeants, and pushed the armed forces’ annual wage bill from ₦660 billion to ₦924 billion; that increase takes effect September 1. It is this second increase, retirees say, that again left pensioners without a matching adjustment.
Defence Ministry officials did not immediately respond publicly to the specific claims raised at Wednesday’s protest. In past disputes over military pension arrears, senior officers including the Military Pensions Board chairman have met with protesting retirees directly, though such meetings have not always resolved the underlying payment delays.
The protest fell on the same day Nigeria’s political class gathered elsewhere in Abuja for the signing of a National Peace Accord ahead of the 2027 general elections, an event that drew a separate mix of dignitaries and security arrangements across the capital.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the demonstration outside the Ministry of Defence had not escalated into confrontation, and no arrests or injuries had been reported in connection with the gathering.
Africa Today News, New York
