Pension fund transfer
Many salaried workers in the country may have breathed a sigh of relief to have read in the Graphic Business that the National Pensions Regulatory Authority (NPRA) will transfer their second tier pension funds to private fund managers next October.
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This will be after four years of being kept in the dark as to what was happening to their contributions from the new scheme which became operational in 2010. The policy was to help give meaning to value for money.
The paper reported that the acting Chief Executive of the NPRA, Mr Laud A.K. Senanu, had indicated that “currently, the process for the transfer has started with an ongoing audit of those funds by Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC).
By the middle of September, the entire audit process should be completed and barring any unforeseen circumstances, we should start transferring the funds to the various schemes by October” .
The absence of information and unpreparedness of the management of the NPRA in responding to enquiries by contributors created a justification of the strike action by teachers in the country. There were those who suspected that the government had diverted the funds to supplement the Consolidated Fund.
While welcoming the move, it is imperative to suggest that workers should be provided statements of account over the period for which their contributions were kept under the Temporary Pension Fund Account at the Bank of Ghana.
This is critical because even for those whose contributions were transferred to private fund managers in 2013, they were given statements for only the 2010 contributions.
There is the need for the NPRA to recognise that the money is for the individuals and held on their behalf. Thus, contributors must be seen to be more important than the money or the managers who have been given the privilege by means of legislation to act for the beneficiaries.
The relationship should not be seen as anything more than trusteeship. The trustees have an obligation towards those on whose behalf they have been appointed to act.
Beyond the transfer of the accrued funds is the question as to what must happen to the lump sum earnings that had accrued to contributors under the old social security scheme under the management of the Social Security and National Insurance Trust as at the time of the transition.
This fact must not be ignored any longer because somebody has to answer to contributors. It is legitimate for workers to be told what has been saved for their future in the name of the law on their behalf. The new scheme was intended to enhance but not to deprive contributors of their legitimate pensions.
That is why both the SSNIT and NAPRA have to come out to address the concerns and anxieties of contributors who were less than 55 years at the time of the transition.
I may be ignorant, but as the Russians maintain, being ignorant is not as useless as not trying to find out by asking questions. More important, I do not speak for myself. There are countless number of Ghanaians who have devoted their energies for national development on starvation wages.
They never earned decent salaries during their normal working lives. They may further end up losing what should have legitimately come to them in their old age. This is because their demands for information on their accrued pension before the transition have not been answered.
They are not sure because those employed by the state to take care of their contributions are unwilling to explain issues to them. That is because such public officials assume that they owe an obligation to the government and not the people whose investment they are managing.
That is where organised labour, spearheaded by the Trades Union Congress, has to intervene. After all, workers are supposed to be represented on the SSNIT. Why should contributors then not be told what will happen to their contributions as accrued with SSNIT at the time of the transition to set their hearts at ease?
What is the difficulty in filtering through information on what the affected contributors should expect? These are some of the issues that an environment of freedom of information legislation could cure.
That is what Joseph Stiglitz means when he submits that “secrecy gives public officials exclusive control over certain areas of knowledge and thereby increases their power….Given that the public has paid for the gathering of government information, it is the public that owns that information.
It is not the private province of the government official, but belongs to the public at large. Thus, the information public officials gather at public expense is owned by the public, just as the chairs, buildings and other physical assets used by the government belong to the public.”