The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), on Thursday, declared that the pension system in the country had failed to address the fears of Nigerian workers.
In buttressing its claim, the NLC revealed that the inefficiencies in the system recently made the police lobby the labour congress to speak for the exit of policemen from the country’s pension scheme.
At the pension industry roundtable, NLC President, Comrade Joe Ajaero said: “We must create a pension system that has integrity, that will attract more people. The police have lobbied us to speak on their behalf so that they will exit the pension arrangement that we have. Why are they doing that”?
Ajaero, who was represented by NLC’s Assistant General Secretary, Comrade Chris Onyeka further said: “The average policeman, when we go out on the field, some of them write to us and ask us to speak on their behalf. They are workers like us and they know how it pinches. I want to be able to use the money I’ve saved. If I cannot use the money now, will it be when I die”?
He pointed out that pensions were about the welfare of workers when they are no longer needed in their places of work.
“If you look at the pension system in Nigeria, what we can say is that as it is today, the pension system does not address to a large extent the fears of Nigerian workers. That is the reality and that is why some of us have concluded that the pension system in Nigeria is parasitic. It leeches on the workers.
“A worker who had saved about N8 million in the last 10 years in his Retirement Savings Account, suddenly with all the economic challenges, the value has crashed. Perhaps if he had used the N8 million at that time, he would have been a rich rice merchant.
“But suddenly the worker cannot purchase the bags of rice that he would have wanted to buy. That N8 million in the last 10 years has crashed to probably N1 million today. That is what we suffer. So, the pension system has not protected the workers”, the NLC president stated.
Ajaero said these issues should be looked into, adding that “issues about how we can make the pension system work for workers while they are alive should be looked into.
“We must also make the pension system attractive to people in the informal sector by protecting the pension funds itself. The government is saying that it wants to borrow from pensions.
“Yes, in other climes, governments borrow funds from the pension system and they pay back. But we are afraid that when our money goes into the pocket of the government, we don’t know what will happen to it. That is our problem.
“Workers are bearing the brunt of the negative impact of our pension system, let us make the system more inclusive and more worker-friendly so that some of us will get involved”, he added.
The President of Abuja Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Nigerian Association of Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture (ACCI), Al-Mujtaba Abubakar, said the roundtable was organised in collaboration with the National Pension Commission to review the progress and challenges of the pension scheme in Nigeria.
