The Chairman Senate Committee on Establishment and Public Service, Senator Aloysious Etuk, on Tuesday commended the recommendations made at the World Pension Summit (Africa Special), noting that it was necessary to include other categories of workers, as well as politicians, in the pension system.
He aired is views while speaking on Channels Television’s breakfast programme, Sunrise Daily.
Speaking on the importance of the Summit, Mr Etuk noted that “we have just realized that pension should not only be for working population. After-all, when we are saying working population – we have those who work in formal sector, informal sector, organised sector, unorganized sector – and everybody should be mobilised to consciously save for the rainy day.
Etuk further advocated that politicians should also be integrated into the pension system, disclosing that he had been forced to abandon his aides in Abuja, when former Head of State, Sanni Abacha, disbanded the House in 1993.
He noted that such a move would ensure that public servants leave office with savings asides other allowances.
“In 1993, when Abacha sacked us from the National Assembly, the money I had on me was not enough to pay my way and my aides back to Lagos. So I had to abandon my aides there and find a way to transport myself to Lagos.”
Speaking on the negative impressions concerning the pension system in Nigeria, the senator said things have changed positively since the advent of the Senate probe into the pension system, which in turn caused the executive to pay attention.
Asked about the security framework put in place to ensure that pensioners have access to their funds as and when due, Senator Etuk stressed that “with the passage of the 2014 Pension Reforms Act, all the leakages, all the cleavages that had existed in the former law, penalties, mode of operation, enhanced level of management and specifications have been set in that law to make sure that nothing like what happened in the past will happen again.”
He noted that most of the challenges were as a result of the previous scheme, maintaining that the Pension Transitional Arrangement (PTA) was added to the Act to assure citizens of the safety of their funds.
Although he admitted that the loop holes had caused a lot of pension criminals to walk away freely, he noted that the consoling factor was that the government was paying the back-logs of pension owed citizens.
On the befitting punishment for pension criminals, he noted that lawmaking is a tedious process but that the law now ensures that a pension thief pays three times what was stolen and is also liable to face a 10 year jail term.
He argued against a death sentence, stressing that law making is not only influenced by local proposals but by international standards.
