NEWS ANALYSIS: NASS Needs To Support PenCom To Deliver Pension

In the last few weeks Ministries, Departments and Agencies of the federal government (MDAs) have been defending their respective 2020 budgets before the joint committee of the Senate and House of representatives.

One of the agencies defending its budget is the National Pension Commission (PenCom).

PenCom is an agency established by the Pension Reform Act 2004 as the body to regulate, supervise and ensure the effective administration of pension matters in Nigeria.

The payment of pension has been an issue for decades. Federal civil servants retire without hope of getting their gratuities and pension as timely as it is required, until recently.

Since the coming of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration, pension payments for retired civil servants have become a priority. But despite the progress made there is still a lot to be done to make life more comfortable for our pensioners.

The federal government is still defaulting in payment of accumulated arrears of pensioners. Between April 2017 and January 2019, the federal government paid the sum of N201.95 billion as retirement benefits.

It’s a huge relief for many pensioners who had waited for years. But it is still insufficient to settle accumulated areas of pension. Civil servants who retired since 2017 are still anxiously waiting for their own pension payments.

While PenCom under the Acting Director-General, Aisha Dahir-Umar, has been doing a great job by introducing reforms to grow PenCom assets and by organizing seminars and workshops to prepare potential retires for life after service, the FG has been unable to meet its obligation.

These are the issues stakeholders in the pension industry expect legislators to help address to make life better for retirees and pensioners. But unfortunately, and contrary to expectations, what came out of the budget defence about the commission is the query by some legislators on how much PenCom spent on its personnel during the year.

One of the stakeholders who spoke in an interview with The Whistler on Friday lamented that accrued rights of retirees have not been paid since September 2018, and many expected the legislators to champion this.

“Instead of the National Assembly talking about personnel cost of PenCom, I think they should be looking into the real issues of the industry.

“When people retire, federal government is supposed to pay them their accumulated rights but that funding has not been coming the way it ought to so we expected that the NASS will focus on these issues.”

The amendment of the Pension Reform Act 2004 raised the percentage of contribution from 14% to 18%, which means that the employee portion increased to 8% while the employers’ portion was raised to 10%.  But the federal government is yet to effect changes on the payments.

These are the real issues that the assembly should worry about and not engage in shadow chasing over running costs of an agency that generates own revenue. As representatives of the people, the legislators should support the push to make pension payments timely and stress free.