Silver surfers – have you seen the FNPF full page ads in the papers? They cost around F$1000 – and you are paying for them! 

Let’s look at the claims:
The FNPF Life Pension is as good a retirement product as you can get anywhere else in the world. 

Only if your pension is not arbitrarily cut! 

• Starting at 8.7% at 55 years the rates increase the older you are when you opt for pension. 

These muppets can’t even speak English!

• Not only are these rates of a lifetime (tax free and no administration fee), your pension is also for life. 

(More bad English). That’s what they told us when we were forced to join up. But that has changed – and can just as easily be changed again. Beware the reduced pension all you new pensioners.

• Make a smart choice now – it’s a choice about the rest of your life!

Yeah – tell us about it! That’s what we thought when we signed up all those years ago!

The ad goes on…If you are a current pensioner you need to be validated, counselled and choose your preferred option under the new pension scheme before 29 February, 2012. 

We do NOT need to be validated – we are already valid human beings. Perhaps we might need to be identified. 

Counselled? Counselling is for people who are at a loss. We are not at a loss. Our contracts have been broken and we know exactly where we stand, and we are going to fight for our rights tooth and nail. Pensioners are intelligent and expect to discuss their options – they do not require counselling 

The ad ends…All correspondence to be addressed to the Chief Executive Officer. Yeah – we all know that will end up in the WPB! 

And by the way – a Savusavu pensioner went to the FNPF office yesterday to discuss his options and was told that the new pension date would be April 1st – interesting! Phone calls to the FNPF in Suva today elicited no better info than that Feb 29 is the cut off date and ‘pension reforms have already started’. 

Watch this space…