Pensions in Nigeria: Fewer ghosts, more savings

DG PenCom Chinelo Anohu-Amazu

After an unpromising start, Nigeria is beginning to encourage local saving and investment
　

FEW people in Africa are fortunate enough to have savings to fall back on in their old age. Having enrolled in a voluntary state-run pension scheme, Stephen Okikiola was always luckier than most. But it was not until Nigeria obliged firms with five or more employees to provide workers with pensions in 2004 that the former pharmaceuticals executive really started accumulating cash. "It’s good to be able to rely on those monthly payments now that I am retired," he says.

Nigeria has spent a decade resurrecting its pension system. Back at the turn of the century, government employees were enrolled in a defined-benefit system (in which eventual payments are fixed). It had run up unfunded liabilities of 2 trillion naira ($12.9 billion). Governments seldom put aside enough money to pay existing pensioners, let alone to cover future costs. Retirees often went unpaid. Most private companies, meanwhile, ignored their obligation to provide pensions for their workers. At those that did, allegations of mismanagement and fraud abounded.

All this changed with the reforms of 2004, which not only instituted mandatory pensions at most private firms, but also converted the government scheme from defined-benefit to defined-contribution (in which the risk of poor investment returns lies with the participants, not the sponsor). The management of the government scheme was also outsourced, and a regulator created to oversee the industry. Since 2005, pension schemes’ assets have grown by more than 25% a year on average, to about 4.2 trillion naira ($26 billion).

That is still a relatively small amount, especially when judged against the government’s massively expanded estimate of the size of the Nigerian economy. In April it nearly doubled its tally of GDP to $510 billion. That reduced pension-scheme assets to about 5% of GDP, compared to 170% in the Netherlands, 131% in Britain and 113% in America.

Moreover, the vast majority of Nigerians work in informal jobs, and so do not have a pension: of a working population of perhaps 80m people, only around 6m participate in any sort of scheme. The government is trying to rectify that, too: a fresh set of reforms, passed in July, extended the obligation to provide a pension to firms employing three or more people. It also increased mandatory contributions from 7.5% of salary for both workers and employers to 8% and 10% respectively.

As a result, savings are expected to grow further. By law, all the money must be invested in Nigeria. The intention is to build a big pool of local cash that will reduce the country’s dependence on foreign aid, loans and investment. That goal has seemed all the more pressing since the prospect of rising interest rates in America caused an exodus of cash from emerging markets last year.

Nigeria’s overwhelmed infrastructure needs billions of dollars a year in investment. Pension schemes looking for long-term, local investments to match their liabilities could fund desperately-needed roads, ports, railways and houses. PenCom, the national regulator, is trying to promote investments in electricity generation, perhaps via the government’s huge privatisation programme. It also wants more forays into private equity.

As things stand, however, pension funds are shunning alternative assets. Overall, infrastructure accounts for less than 2% of their assets, compared with 68% for government bonds and 13% for shares. That is partly because there are only two registered infrastructure funds in Nigeria and no dedicated infrastructure bonds, according to Stanbic IBTC Pension Managers, Nigeria’s biggest pension-fund administrator. These are new and intimidating asset classes for local fund managers, says Kayode Akindele, of 46 Parallels, an investment manager.

Meanwhile, for the lucky few, life has improved. Former civil servants say they no longer have to queue for hours to collect their payments—the money goes straight to their accounts. And things have become more transparent. "Ghost workers" used to account for a huge proportion of payments disbursed, according to Demola Sogunle, the boss of Stanbic. Those days, he says, are now over.



Source: The Economist