By Victor AhiumaYoung
Former President of Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, and immediate past Governor of Edo State, Senator Adams Oshiomhole, has called on organised Labour to revisit the management of pension fund.
Oshiomhole, who was NLC’s President then, played a significant role in the Pension Reform in 2004 and the birth of the Contributory Pension Scheme, CPS, lamented that one of the significant purposes for the CPS had been sidelined.
According to Oshiomhole, the federal and state governments were borrowing from the contributory pension fund at a low interest rate, thereby breaching the concept of establishing the CPS.
The former National Chairman of the All Progressive Congress, APC, spoke at the 8th Quadrennial National Delegates Conference of the Non-Academic Staff Union of Educational and Associated Institutions,NASU, in Abuja.
The theme of the conference was “Trade Unionism in the Era of Economic Crisis: Addressing the Increasing Poverty Level of Nigerian Workers.”
Among others, Oshiomhole said: “The workers social capital is what the employers and the government call pension fund. That pension fund is contributed by you (workers). May we not be like motor mechanic that repairs vehicles for car owners but when they are going home they have no cars.
“May we not be like carpenters who construct the best of furniture, but have none in their homes. Those are not the results of God. They are the result of the way we have chosen to organize our society. Everybody is struggling to see that the system works in his favour.
“We negotiated and I recall I resisted the idea of contributory pension fund being managed by pension fund administrators, PFAs, because these PFAs are profit seekers. You cannot give six per cent return on my pension savings and yet the interest rate in the banks is 25 per cent. It means I am getting poorer. We can’t accept that. Today, pension fund is over 11 trillion Naira deducted from workers’ money.
“If they put that N11 trillion or more into mass housing, will workers still remain homeless? We were told that the reason we didn’t have flourishing mortgage system was that Nigerian banks do not have long term funds. They told us that those who have money put the money in one month, three months and maximum one year term. So, they can’t invest such money in mortgage.
“But with pension scheme, there is long term money. Workers start contributing from the day they are employed may be when they are 22 years old or so. By the time they are retiring at 60, they must have contributed enough to buy a house. So, you buy a house, they deduct money the way they deduct your pension, they deduct your mortgage. By the time you are retiring if you don’t have any other thing, you have a roof over your head.
“Today, is the money being used for the social purpose? The answer is no. The government calls it revenue , capital or pension fund. It is actually workers social capital to address workers social capital needs. What are your capital needs? It is housing before any other thing.
“Make a proper resolution, work with the NLC so that together we must revisit this money that the National Pension Commission, PenCom, is managing. Who is borrowing the money? What are they doing with it? The money is being borrowed by state and federal governments to do every other thing except housing. It is not meant to fix bridges or to build federal highways.
“When you hear state government going to capital market to borrow funds, the cheapest money available now is this pension fund. That was not the agreement that we signed. We did not sign to replace the social purpose of the fund .
“I ask you not to cry for being homeless, but insist that the pension funds is refocused to the social purpose of pension. When you do that, there would be a fight on issue and I will support you wherever I am.”
Source: Vanguard