Director-General, National Pension Commission, Mrs. Chinelo Anohu-Amazu
The total Assets under the Contributory Pension Scheme rose to N4.61tn at the end of the 2014 financial year from N2.05tn in the preceding year.
Report on the pension fund portfolio for the period obtained by our correspondent from the National Pension Commission on Thursday showed that the funds, which had maintained a steady growth over the years, were invested in different instruments.
Some of the instruments are domestic and foreign ordinary shares, Federal Government of Nigeria securities, state government securities, corporate debt securities, supra-national bonds, local money market securities and foreign money market securities.
Other investment areas are open/closed-end funds, real estate properties, private equity funds, cash and other assets.
According to the report, the assets of the Closed Pension Fund Administrators to total contribution rose to N662.8bn in the period under review.
The total funds, however, fell from N4.58tn in September to N4.57tn in October, while contributions of the CPFAs fell from N657.5bn to N651.49bn in the same period.
In July and August, the total contributions by employers and their employees to the CPS rose to N4.45tn and N4.5tn, while CPFAs contributed N651.1bn and N655.65bn to the total figure.
The total fund and contributions of the CPFAs rose from N4.2tn and N650.4bn in April to N4.32tn and N668.2bn in May.
In March the total contribution and those of the CPFAs rose to N4.2tn and N622.2bn from N4.09tn and N462.3bn grossed in January.
The Director-General, National Pension Commission, Mrs. Chinelo Anohu-Amazu, said the CPS had generated a pool of long-term investible funds that were attractive to fund managers, investment advisers and capital market operators, who wanted to access the fund for different purposes.
According to her, the Pension Reform Act, 2004 ushered in a uniformed contributory pension scheme for workers in both the private and public sectors in Nigeria.
She said its implementation, which commenced in June 2004, reformed the crisis-ridden under-funded defined benefit pension schemes in the country.
“The huge and increasing pension liabilities in the public sector needed to be addressed while most workers in the private sector were not covered by any form of retirement benefit scheme,” Anohu-Amazu said.
She noted that the inefficient administration of pension schemes and demographic shifts made the defined benefit schemes unsustainable.
The PenCom boss added that the amendments to the pension law were to take care of shortfalls in coverage, address supervisory and enforcement challenges, correct anomalies in the taxation of pension assets and to enable the deployment of the pension fund to develop infrastructure.
Anohu-Amazu said the accumulated pension assets in the custody of Pension Fund Custodians were being privately managed by Pension Fund Administrators, while PenCom was regulating and supervising pension operators.
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