By Johnbosco Agbakwuru

ABUJA—THE Act establishing the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund, NSITF, is being amended for better service to Nigerians especially to cater for elderly, the sick, unemployment benefit among others.

Acting Managing Director of NSITF, Ismail Agaka, who spoke in Abuja, at the training of staff ahead of the expected challenges of expansion of its mandate, explained that the ongoing amendment, when completed, would enable NSITF execute other aspects of social protection programmes.

According to him, NSITF was presently implementing only compensation for workplace injury out of the nine branches of social security as spelt out by the International Labour Organisation, ILO, Convention 102 of minimum standard of social security.

He said, “The amended law will enable NSITF do more than the employees’ compensation scheme it is currently running. The other areas of social protection include: old age pension, survivor, family benefit, unemployment benefit, and invalidity benefit.”

Other benefits of the NSITF Act if amended included, “Medical benefit, sick benefit and workplace injury benefit that we are implementing,” adding, “For us to execute other aspects the law establishing the scheme has to do be amended and that is on-going at the National Assembly.

“NSITF can add the invalidity benefit, which has correlation with what we are doing. We can also factor in the survivor benefit, which has correlation with employees compensation scheme because these three work hand and hand and we developed the capacity to add more aspects of social security with what we are doing already,” he said.

Besides, Agaka said that the NSITF had developed training modules that were specifically weaved to meet the occupational needs of its staffers.