Yemisi Izuora
Minister of Power,Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola has called on stakeholders in the pension sector to work in concert to sustain and further step up gains made by the National Pension Commission (PenCom) to avoid the gory story of previous pension scheme.
Fashola who spoke at the just concluded Pension Industry Strategy Implementation RoadMap Retreat took a tour of the History of Pension Funds in Nigeria.
“It is impossible in this kind of forum to exhaustively deal with the issue of Pension Funds and its management in the Nigerian public service.
What is appropriate is to highlight the largely unsuccessful initiatives that have been characterized by such brand names as the National Provident Fund (NPF) and the National Social Insurance Trust Fund (NSITF).
Those brands represent the era when pension was only the responsibility of the employer, What simply happened was that from a failure of governance, coupled with lack of funds as a result of planning deficiency, and sometimes incompetence, pensioners faced a life of uncertainty after a lifetime of service and at a time when they had become frail, unable to work or earn income and often then left disappointed by a system that had taken all they had to give”.
The minister recalled “It is sad a story that is written on so many faces characterized by many living and dead people whose lives tell the story of anguish.
It is a chapter of Nigeria’s story that is perhaps best forgotten, but regrettably they cannot yet be consigned to history because there are still debts to be paid, there are still beneficiaries who are owed, there are still Nigerians, who gave a lot, almost everything under a defined benefit scheme that is yet to give them benefit”.
The current pension regime, whose managers are the organizers of this event happily have a better story to tell, he said adding that it is a story of mutual contribution, where the employee and the employer share the responsibility of planning for the tomorrow.
Commending the competence of the regulator, PenCom, he added that “It is a story different from the past, where the funds are safe and have exceeded N5 Trillion. It is a story of better management. It is the starting point for this discussion because there is a hard lesson here.
If people put their money into what they believe in, it is likely to serve them better”.
He observed that the old scheme operated in such a way where there was no contribution by the employee perhaps reduced their role as stakeholders but does not justify the mismanagement.
He said however, “that the real story is about contribution, paying your share; and it takes me to the next point which is diversification and the relevance of diversification to our subject.
It is not a vision or an idea. It has gone beyond that. It is a journey, one that started a while ago when the Pension Reform Act was signed into Law.
That journey started with the coming together of some Nigerian minds. Minds like that of President Olusegun Obasanjo and Mr Fola Adeola. It has been nurtured by the dedicated hands of men and women who have served in the pension commission who are represented by the current Director- General Mrs Chinelo Amazu- Anohu. It has reached a major milestone from where it must reinvigorate itself “.
The tools for that reinvigoration have been provided by our legislators in the Amendment they passed into in 2014, Fashola noted.