By Johnbosco Agbakwuru

ABUJA—THE Minister of Labour and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige has told the management of the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund, NSITF, to extend the Employee Compensation Scheme, ECS, to the private sector.

Dr Chris Nwabueze Ngige

Senator Ngige who gave the advice when he paid a working visit to the corporate headquarters of NSITF in Abuja, also told its management to commence the prosecution of all companies that had defaulted in complying with the ECS.

This is as the Acting Managing Director of the Fund, Ismail Agaka has disclosed that NSITF has so far registered about 51,576 employers since inception, with 16,909 of them being registered between January and November 2016.

Senator Ngige said the ECS was a beneficial scheme that should involve everybody in the country, both people in the private sector even people in the informal sector.

According to him; “I want the NSITF to drag more recalcitrant companies to court over infractions. And I want as many companies as possible to go to court for not obeying the law of the land and the legal department must be active in this regard.

“The companies that are not complying are shortchanging their workers because in those places, workers are still treating themselves when they sustain injury in the course of work. This is completely unfair and government will not sit by and watch Nigerian workers suffer unnecessarily.”

“We want the little money they earn to stay in their pockets. Employers have responsibility towards their employees and they must be made to fulfill those responsibilities, which employees’ compensation scheme is a major part.”

He said many employers of labour in the country were cheating their workers who spend their own money to treat themselves especially when involved in industrial accident.

The minister who said the Fund had not lived up to the expectations, challenged its management to spread the dragnet and carry out a compulsory turnaround of the fund in other to achieve its mandate of providing social protection for Nigerian workers.

According to him, the ECS was one of the nine social security initiatives contained in the International Labour Organisation convention 102, adding that the Nigerian government was doing everything possible to domesticate the convention which also include health Insurance and conditional cash transfer.