Tag: Nigerian Newspapers

THE National Pension Commission (PenCom) on Monday said N16 billion unremitted pension contributions have been recovered from various employers of labour in the last seven years.

The Commission also said pension assets have risen to N9.33 trillion as at the end of June 2019, as a total number of 8.72 contributors are registered with the commission across the country.

Its Acting Director General,  Aisha Dahir-Umar spoke during a one-day workshop in Port Harcourt, Rivers State. The workshop was organised by  Nigeria Employers’ Consultative Association (NECA) and PenCom on: Current Developments and Challenges in the Implementation of the Pension Reform Act 2014.

Represented by Salihu Bwala, she said the pension asset was N7.44 trillion in January, 2019 and rose to over N9 trillion within five months, attributing the rise to  the support from the organised private sector (OPS) and labour.

She said: “The pension industry is one of the fastest growing industry in the country with the support of the OPS  and labour. The contributory pension scheme plan currently has over N9 trillion pension assets. This feat could not have been achieved without the support of the OPS.

“President Mohammadu Buhari officially launched the micro pension plan in March 2019 and remittance of contributions have since commenced.”

Dahir-Umar  said the Commission had developed an application that had tackled the problem of multiple registration and urged employers to encourage their employees to avail themselves to their respective pension administrators for data recapture and regularisation.

“The Commission recently developed a robust application to enhance contribution registration system for the pension industry. The application has been deployed and pension practitioners are currently using it for new registration and recapture of data for contributors who previously had retirement savings accounts.

“The application is linked to the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) and would assist in addressing issues of multiple registrations in the database of pension funds administrators.

“Accordingly, all employers are asked to encourage their employees to present themselves to their respective pension administrators for recapture.”

Read Also: PenCom fines defaulting employers N7.79b

A resource person at the event, Demi Mokikan, in his lecture titled: The challenges of Compliance and the way forward,  said the over N16 billion debts recovered comprised principal contribution and not less than two per cent penalty/fines slammed on employers who failed to remit their employees eight per cent contributions which they deducted at source and the employee mandatory 10per cent, seven days after they had paid their salaries.

NECA Director-General,  Timothy Olawale urged employers to comply with the 2014 reformed Pension Act.

“We are calling on employers of labour to ensure that they become corporate responsible citizens by complying with provisions of the law especially with regards of the pension scheme.

“One of the ways employers can engender productivity which is important for business profitability is by taking the welfare of the workers a top priority by contributing to their pension which takes care of the worker’s welfare at work and after life,” he said.

NIGERIA is losing over N30 billion yearly to non-compliance to internationally accepted safety standards by employers, businesses and employees, the Institute of Safety Professionals of Nigeria (ISPON), has said.

Its Chairman, Lagos State branch, Timothy  Iwuagwu,  said loss could run into trillions, considering the fact that most safety incidents  are either un-reported or under-reported in the country.

He also said lives lost to work-related accidents caused by gross negligence to proper corporate safety processes cannot be quantified in monetary term. Besides, the bulk of those at work, he said, are self employed; they are mostly operators in the informal sector who do not heed the guidelines regarding safety at work.

Iwuagwu, who spoke on the sidelines of the “5th Nigerian Safety Award for Excellence Hall of Fame (9ja SAFE Awards)/Fire-fighters’ Appreciation Dinner 2019” in Lagos, bemoaned inadequate regulation of the industry, blaming it on dearth of professionals.

“The Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) industry is not adequately regulated, because we are grossly deficient in the number of professionals in Nigeria. Secondly, we don’t have people with the technical understanding of the necessity to have established safety monitoring systems,” he said.

Iwuagwu, who is also a retired Naval Engineer and former Head of Security and Safety Practices Management Department of the Armed Forces Centre, said although, there are laws to regulate the safety industry, those in positions of authority lacked the will power to implement them.

“People on positions of authority who are supposed to leverage on existing laws and statutory guidelines to regulate the industry lack the will to implement the laws, even though monetisation of non-compliance can also help the federating units generate revenue for themselves and the nation,” he said.

The safety expert and member of the 9ja SAFE Awards Technical Team, said for this year’s award, his team recommended mostly companies based on their compliance to internationally accepted safety standards.

He said because safety is still evolving in Nigeria and the level of safety consciousness is low, his team, in selecting the awardees, adopted some parts of the internationally accepted standards and domesticated them within the limits of Nigeria’s industrial environment.

AN extended Saudi oil outage could push Brent crude prices to $75 per barrel, American multinational investment bank and financial services firm,  Goldman Sachs warned clients on Monday.

It said the historic attack on the country’s processing plant has disrupted one of the world’s largest energy supply chains.

Brent crude futures on Monday rose $6.21 to $66.43, about 10per cent; West Texas Intermediate futures climbed $5.19 to 60.04, or 9.4per cent. Earlier in the session, the surge in Brent prices represented the largest one-day move on record.

Continued surge in crude prices is good for Nigeria’s N8.91 trillion naira ($29 billion) budget implementation.

The budget was based on estimated crude production of 2.3 million barrels a day (bpd), $60 per barrel benchmark.

It was also  based on an exchange rate of N305 naira to the dollar.

Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer and member, Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) grew its economy by 1.93 per cent last year, its fastest pace since a recession two years earlier, data showed, while inflation which has been in double digits for three years, fell to 11.22 percent in June.

Saturday’s attack was “a historically large disruption on critical oil infrastructure and these events represent a sharp escalation in threats to global supply with risks of further attacks,” its Global Head of Commodities Research, Jeffrey Currie and Senior Commodity Strategist Damien Courvalin, said in a note.

“Should the current level of outage be announced to last for more than six weeks, we expect Brent prices to quickly rally above $75/bbl,” they said in a note.

Goldman’s warning came after weekend strikes on the heart of Saudi Arabian oil production facilities in Abqaiq and Khurais claimed by Yemen’s Houthi rebels. Saudi Aramco, the country’s large state-backed oil company, said Sunday it was hoping to restore on Monday about one-third of its crude output that was disrupted. The drone attacks eliminated 5.7 million barrels of production over the weekend.

Oil prices rise will hinge on how long it will take Aramco to fully restore production, the Goldman team said. A very short outage, for example, would likely drive prices higher to reflect growing tensions in the Middle East, but only tick up $3–$5 per barrel.

“The magnitude of such a price rally is difficult to estimate in the absence of official comments on the timeline and scale of production losses. An extreme net outage of a 4 mb/d for more than three months would likely bring prices above $75/bbl to trigger both large shale supply and demand responses,”they wrote.

In response to the attack and in expectation of a spike in oil prices, President Donald Trump authorised the release of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve if needed to keep the market well-supplied.

“These events represent a sharp escalation in threats to global oil supply with previous drone attacks mostly intercepted, evidence that Saudi Aramco’s strongly guarded oil facility – Abqaiq – is ultimately vulnerable, a risk of further attacks (the Shaybah oilfield (1 mb/d) was unsuccessfully attacked last month), as well as potential for further escalation in the region with the US Secretary of State blaming Iran for these attacks,” Goldman Sachs wrote.