In April 2014, the National Pension Commission,
PenCom, announced that the pension assets has hit 4.3 Trillion Naira, and also
stated that the operators in the scheme has 20 PFAs, 4PFCs, 7CPFAs, 19AES,and
more recently the Police Pension Fund.
The astronomical increase in pension assets at the
point of writing this article may far in be excess of 4.7 Trillion, may have
been necessitated by the strict oversight functions of PenCom, the body vested
by the provisions of the Pension Reform Act as being responsible for the
supervision and control of the Pension Fund Administrators, Pension Fund
Custodians and other relevant players in the scheme.
The recent amendment of the 2004 Pension Reform
Act, which resulted in its repeal and the subsequent provisions of the Pension
Reform Act 2014 will positively consolidate more on the pension assets as the
relevant portions of the law has increased the coverage to states, local
governments, and employers with minimum of three employees.
What these portends is that of sustainability , a
market deepening and expansion which will definitely results in Larger pension
assets. But market deepening and expansion has its problems which includes handling the issue of customer
service delivery and incidence of high technological cost.
Technology is a paramount necessity in all spheres
of business life and pension cannot be an exception, linked to technology is
the issue of customer service delivery as the market deepening will come with
it, a larger customer base waiting to be serviced on a regular bases.
But far from these, the increase in Pension Assets
will definitely results in large investible funds for the real sector and
infrastructure, but the idea of investing in real sector and infrastructure
comes with it a myriad of problems like
corruption, inflation of contracts, kick back just to mention a few, what then
do we do as corruption or fraudulent
practices may results in the retiree not able to access his funds at the point
of retirement.
Odunze Reginald
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