Insurance losses over N150b yearly to fake vehicle policies racketeers

Chuks Udo Okonta

Over N150 billion is loss by the insurance industry yearly, to fake vehicle policies racketeers, Inspen can report.

Investigation revealed that out of the over 12.5 million vehicles on the nation's roads, only I.5 million have genuine insurance particulars, which are either comprehensive which is sold at 10 per cent of the worth of the vehicle or third party which is sold at N5,000.

Director General Nigerian Insurers Association (NIA), Sunday Thomas, said about 1.5 million vehicle policies have so far been uploaded on the industry's database which was designed to capture the data of all insurered vehicles in the country.

He said: "So far close to 1.5 million vehicles have been uploaded, which is still a far cry from our expectations. Our target is to upload all the vehicles in the country.

"One of the major objectives of the Nigerian Insurance Industry Database (NIID) is able to capture the data of transactions within the market. In the past, this has been very difficult to get. We had people bouncing different figures all around, we want to put an end to that, and we need some time to do that.

"We will continue to update the record. There has not been any structured policy in the past, to get figures of numbers of vehicles. We only transact in terms of the financial reports not the typical present of number of vehicles. We are looking to a situation where we would be able to say this is the number of lives and vehicles insured in Nigeria.

"If you ask me today about the number of insured vehicles in the country, I would tell you that they are about 1.5 million, because that is what I can account for and have on my system."

Group Managing Director Mutual Benefits Assurance Plc, Akin Ogunbiyi, said of all the vehicles going on Nigerian roads, 90 per cent of the third party are fake papers.

He noted that to capture the untapped business, the company invested in vehicle registration platform, which is a subset of its information and technology investment, adding the initiative was conceived to serve the industry.

"We have 12.5 million vehicles on nigerian roads, according to statistics outside Okadas and tricycles. If you want to achieve the objective of Market Development and Restructuring Initiative (MDRI), increasing insurance contribution to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), this aspect that is even compulsory is in the hands of touts and we are losing income on daily basis.

"Today, we have sold over 250,000 third party policies. Multiple 250,000 by 5,000, we don’t undercut. If you get on any of our platform, of course it is 5,000. But how do we push it, we now used the platform to assist states to generate internal revenue," he said.