By SIMON EBEGBULEM

BENIN—GOVERNOR Adams Oshiomhole of Edo State has identified lack of reliable national data bank as an impediment to national development.

Oshiomhole stated this, yesterday, when he granted audience to a delegation of the Nigeria Insurance Trust Fund, led by its Managing Director and Chief Executive, Alhaji Umar Abubakar, at Government House, Benin City.
The governor said: “The crisis we have is the problem of not having a reliable national data bank and until we fix that, we will continue to have serious challenges managing schemes like this and dealing with fraudulent people who take advantage of certain gaps to perpetuate certain practices which make management of social security very difficult.

“In other countries, if you have any transaction, the first question is what your social security number is and with that your data and everything can be accessed, for all sorts of purposes. But these are huge challenges and I know that part of that we tried to address, when I was there trying an update on membership contribution.

“I imagine the challenges you are dealing with. The more products you have, the bigger the challenges that arise from implementation of goals. I think one of the major problems I see is that there was not enough communication between NSITF,  state and local government on the essence of this particular aspect of employee compensation.”
Earlier, Abubakar said they were in Edo State to update the governor on their new products and solicit his support to woo other state governors to patronise the employees’ compensation scheme.