By Rosemary Onuoha

The National Pension Commission (PenCom) has said that employees in Nigeria are not embracing the contributory pension scheme as expected given the number of workers in the country.

Director-General of PenCom, Mr. Muhammad Ahmad said this  at an interactive forum with pressmen recently. He said  that the number of contributors to the scheme still fall short of expectation given the 42 million estimated working people in the country.

According to Pencom, the regulatory body for pension and retirement benefits management business in the country,  the number of Retirement Savings Account (RSA) holders in the country stood at 4,799,189 as at December 31, 2010.

When compared with the  4.01 million number of RSA for the previous year, this indicates that  less than 800,000 contributors joined the contributory pension scheme in the country between January and December 2010.

Tracing the growth in new registration of RSA holders, Ahmad said licensed Pension Fund Administrators (PFAs) managing the scheme registered 4.67 million contributors as at the end of third quarter of 2010, as against 4,540,352 employees at the end of second quarter of 2010 and 4,132,217 as at the end of first quarter of last year.

The PFAs registered 3.88 million contributors as at the third quarter of 2009 and 3,706,467 contributors as at the end of second quarter of 2009 and 3.54 million contributors on March 31, 2009.

The scheme was said to have recorded 1.96 million contributors as at March 16, 2007 and 2.12 million contributors as at April 20, 2007

Ahmad also traced the slow rate of growth in the number of contributors to inadequate awareness and enlightenment for the would-be contributors and encouraged all the operators in the pension industry to help in this regard.

He added that this may be due to poor level of compliance from the private and informal sectors, as well as non implementation of the scheme in some states of the federation.

Meanwhile, the Director-General has also called on operators in the industry under the aegis of Pension Operators Association of Nigeria (PenOp) to help to create more awareness on the new contributory pension system.

Making this call during the investiture of the new President of PenOp, Mr. Dave Udenu, Ahmad noted that after six years of contributory pension scheme in the country, there were still “general misconceptions on the working of the contributory pension scheme which PenOp should assist in enlightening the public and in particular, stakeholders on the scheme and the industry”.

According to him, the commission has been doing a lot in terms of public education and would appreciate the contribution of PenOp in this direction.

He also encouraged the operators to parley workers and pensioners representatives saying “as a young industry, we cannot rule out the existence of external threats and to contain this, we need to liaise with and involve our stakeholders in all our activities.”

“The commission has been having series of stakeholders’ engagement with Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), Nigeria Employers Consultative Association (NECA), and Nigerian Union of Pensioners (NUP) among others on issues of common concern in the industry.