Book review
Title: Understanding Retirement Planning
Author: Olakunle Abiona Ogunbameru
Publisher: Obafemi Awolowo Univesity Press, Ile-Ife.
Year of publication: 2022
This book’s dedication to Senator Kashim Shettima is instructive: “This book is dedicated to the Distinguished Senator Alhaji Kashim Shettima, the immediate past executive governor of Borno State, Nigeria,” the book’s short Dedication opened. ”Senator Shettima was a worker-friendly governor for a full term of eight years with remarkable legacies …”
What’s instructive here is the focus on value. It had nothing to do with tribe: Shettima is Kanuri from the North East. The author is Yoruba from the South West — two extreme ends of Nigeria.
Neither, with faith. Shettima is Muslim while the author is Christian. Yet, on value delivery, both find perfect harmony: the author offering ringing praise of the former governor’s worker-friendly policies.
In an election season where informed voters look out for past deeds, good or bad, to shape their minds and sway their votes, it is more than a thousand adverts.
Of course, the book has a title: Understanding Retirement Planning. But for its trove of penetrating facts on its core focus — retirement planning — it could also have borne other equally valid titles.
One: “Retiring retirement”? The author himself, in the rather detailed back-of-the-book (BOB) blurb, hinted at helping the potential reader to “retire retirement itself before you retire”.
How? By filling the knowledge void to banish sundry fears that often plague a retiree: post-work long life without income, possible ill health without cash to buy treatment and care, a shambolic social security system, loneliness, loss of work-enabled social contacts, and phobia for irrelevance, among others.
Two: “Book of Understanding”? All of its eight chapters start with Understanding: concepts of retirement planning, overcoming the fears and risks of retirement, planning for retirement, informal sector retirement planning, living a healthy life in retirement, couples and blissful retirement, writing your own will before retirement and finally winning titbits to spend and enjoy retirement.
Three: “Primer of Life”? With forays into the medical nitty-gritty to confront old age ailments (Chapter 5), legal tutorials in will-writing (Chapter 7), a rich lecture in the dos-and-don’ts of retirement planning for the informal sector (Chapter 4), the sheer trove of vocations and new hobbies, in gardening and other areas (Chapter 8), and an informal treatise in spousal glow and warmth after retirement (Chapter 6), the book may well pass for a life primer, though told from the prism of a retiree.
Four: “Retirement: financial planning and security not enough”? All through, the book stressed the primacy of sound financial planning, suggesting that such planning could — indeed, should — start very early in a future retiree’s working life.
But while sound financial planning, epitomized by sundry investments with the help of an investment advisor if necessary, it’s only the main frame of retirement comfort. That frame must be nourished by what the author called “retirement emotional planning”.
This is a clarion call to well-rounded retirement planning, balancing the material with emotional anchor. That paves the way for retirement bliss, even with old age ailments, the wear-and-tear of long life, always knocking, rather insistently, on the door.
This work is the quintessential teacher at work: crisp, clear and compact mind. Each chapter starts with an opening quote and ends with a parting précis — the very epitome of the ultra-organized mind.
But in that strength also comes its psychological drawback: a clear bibliophile presuming everyone is “condemned” to reading — and pleasurably so! Otherwise, the author ought to have impressed on his artists/book designers to make the body text bigger, since a mighty chunk of the readers might be seniors, though the book’s appeal is designed across the ages.
Prof. Olakunle Abiona Ogunbameru, 70, himself just retired from the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife — a personal epoch that his colleagues marked with a festschrift on August 8, with a book, Social Sciences and National Development: Perspectives in Contemporary Nigeria Society, launched in his honour.
The professor at the OAU Department of Sociology and Anthropology, with special professional interest in gerontology, helped to design a pin-point survey to capture some 114, 000 needy Osun seniors, who received N10, 000 monthly stipends under Governor Rauf Aregbesola, from January 2012 to November 2018, when that government exited, under the Agba Osun (Osun Elders) scheme.
In Understanding Retirement Planning, the professor showcased his seasoned scholarship in retirement studies, a specialized area in “worker” gerontology. Indeed, the professor is, to quote directly from the book’s preliminary pages, “a pioneer scholar in the empirical study of retirement and a retirement counsellor”. Understanding Retirement Planning shows why.
From an excellent grasp of investment instruments to bolster retirement planning, the psycho-social demands of retirement, its wellness rigours, not to forget spousal and marital health and old-age hobbies and exercises, the author provides a trove of empirical studies, across sundry academic disciplines, all tied to retirement planning.
Indeed, with this rich mine, the reader faces the virtual financial advisor, marriage counsellor, old age aerobics coach, gardening and sundry hobbies instructor — all of them dishing out research-based facts, all from the prism of old age and retirement.
This is a wonderful book that should capture all grades of workers, including those in the informal sector. Old age is a blessing. But its flip side could also be a burden, without adequate after-work financial, health and emotional plans.
This should be standard handbook for anyone hoping for happy retirement. But the crux is: the planning must start now — even for those receiving their first pay cheques!
Return of the native
On New Year’s Day 2021, Otunba Kunle Kalejaye, SAN, aka KK, invited friends to his native Ilese, to commission the Adetunmbi Adebanjo Hall, a multi-purpose auditorium he donated to the Ogun State College of Health Technology, Ilese-Ijebu, Ogun State. The facility was to honour his elder sister, Madam Adebanjo, who just turned 72.
Less than two years on, August 12, on the virtual eve of the climax of the town’s yearly Ilese Day community festival, the Ogun government announced KK as the new pro-chancellor and chairman of council of that same college.
Given the eminent lawyer’s passion for developing his home town, the latest being the siting of a private radio, Eagle FM 102.5, it’s the return of the native to double down on what he does best — immense community value.
Here’s wishing KK the best of luck — and pluck — in his new assignment.