• Nigerian senior citizens deserve a better deal
Continuing reports of senior citizens in pains on account of unpaid pensions, and difficulties experienced under the country’s pension scheme, are increasingly disturbing. This is because the pathetic suffering is no news. It is bad enough that the system created pains. It is even worse that the agonies are sustained in both public and private sectors.
It is worrying that 11 years after the enactment of the Pension Reform Act of 2004, two major employers of labour in the country — state governments and the organised private sector — have been identified as major defaulters, following their failure to fully adopt and effectively operate the Contributory Pension Scheme (CPS).
It is noteworthy that the National Pension Commission (PenCom), the pension sector regulator, painted a sad and condemnable picture of pension operation in the public sector in its Act implementation status report. The document said: “As at the end of the first quarter, 2015, 26 state governments had enacted laws on the CPS, while the remaining 10 were at the bills stage. Eight out of the 36 states had commenced remittance of contributions into the Retirement Savings Account (RSA) of their employees.”
The reported level of public sector compliance is unacceptably low, and gives little cause for optimism. But the picture is no less gloomy concerning compliance by private sector players.
Importantly, the PenCom report is corroborated by media investigations. According to a recent publication, “Many state governments are unable to pay pensions. Some do not remit their counterpart deductions, as required by the Pension Act, to workers’ respective Pension Fund Administrators (PFAs). Others, yet, have no plans or ideas on how to pay.”
It continued: “Besides, many private sector organisations do not comply with Pension Act regulations requiring them to partner with workers in contributing to the scheme and providing how retirees would access their funds.”
Certainly, the problem cannot be exclusively attributed to the country’s so-called harsh economic realities. It goes deeper than that factor, and reflects a clear insensitivity to the circumstances of pensioners who have invested the energies of their active years only to be tortured by disappointment in retirement. It is unfair to the pensioners; and the defaulting parties must accept responsibility.
The question must be asked: What is the use of the Pension Act, if its regulations can be flouted with impunity? Put differently, the relevant authorities need to urgently address the injustice imposed on pensioners who are being prevented from reaping where they have sown by a system that is not working according to plan.
Just how terrible the pensioners’ plight is was captured by Comrade Osmond Ugwu, Chairman, Enugu State Workers’ Forum, who was quoted as saying that the contributory pension scheme “prepares the retiree to die before his time, because there is nothing you are hoping on.” Ugwu added: “This particular policy is entirely a policy of frustration and founded on injustice. It has nothing to benefit the worker…It is the lack of fiscal management that has brought this problem on workers.”
Apart from the agonising experience of the pensioners, the situation offers no comfort to workers who cannot look forward to retirement with peace of mind. It amounts to a double loss: if workers expected to bear deductions from their salaries for pension purposes end up bearing the pain of delayed pension payment — or worse: non-payment of their pensions.
To redeem the system, defaulters should be sanctioned. That should send a strong signal that the scheme is designed to work, so sabotage, in any form, would not be tolerated.
The country’s pensioners deserve peaceful retirement. The operation of the scheme meant to create an enabling environment for this end must be sanitised to achieve its laudable objective.