By Favour Nnabugwu
The pension asset value rose by N123.47 billion in July 2021 to close at N12.78 trillion compared to N12.66 trillion recorded in the previous month.
This is contained in the pension funds industry report for the review month as released by the National Pension Commission.
According to the report, the net asset value of Nigeria’s pensions fund recorded a 0.98% increase in the month of July 2021, while 22,349 RSA registrations were recorded in the same month increasing total contributors to 9.4 million.
A cursory look at the data, reveals pension asset value has gained N474.49 billion between January and July of the year. In the same vein, 189,765 more contributors have been registered into the scheme, year-to-date.
Pension Fund managers in Nigeria have been recording stellar performances in their various portfolios year-to-date, owing to their systematic investments, so as to edge other competitors in the industry. Recall, that the competition in the industry has grown significantly since contributors can now easily transfer from one administrator to another.
A recent analysis by Nairametrics shows 70% of the 22 PFAs recorded positive growth across their four retirement savings account funds (RSA I – IV), with Stanbic IBTC, Veritas Glanvills and APT Pension leading the list of best-performing PFAs between January and July 2021.
While the growth in the number of RSA registration seems to be increasing in a linear form, it is still very small compared to Nigeria’s labour force or working population. In context, Nigeria’s labour force data as released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), shows that 30.57 million and 15.92 million Nigerians are fully and underemployed respectively.
Simple computation of the total 46.5 million employed Nigerian indicates that only 20% of the working population is currently captured in the Nigerian pension fund scheme. This is significantly low for a country that boasts of being the largest economy on the continent.
Meanwhile, South Africa’s Government Employees Pension Fund (GEPF) with a lesser population boasts of Africa’s largest pension fund with over 1.2 million active members and assets in excess of R1.61 trillion (N46.3 trillion).
