By Bukola Kayode
The Managing Director of the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund, Oluwaseun Faleye, has announced plans to bring in more state into the scheme.
This is as he pledged stricter enforcement measures to tackle non-compliance at the sub-national level and employers.
Speaking during an interaction with the Labour Correspondents Association of Nigeria as part of the launch of the comprehensive enlightenment and enrollment campaign on Wednesday.
Faleye further told journalists that the Fund has prioritized improving compliance among Ministries, Departments, and Agencies, adding that the federal government has shown increasing interest in ensuring employees are covered under the scheme.
He said: “I think that the MDAs are working closely, and whilst we are engaging with them, I just received a letter from the Head of Service yesterday, reiterating our commitment to this scheme and advising the relevant parties to cooperate with us. So at the federal level, we have seen much more interest by the leadership to engage the fund and to bring the employees under the scheme, given that we have enumerated the benefits to them and they understand it. I think what is left for us is to operationalize that.
“Those budgetary provisions are of a lack of awareness. So we are tackling those things systematically, bringing their awareness, then following up with them to ensure that they are budgeted for that expenditure and once it is budgeted, it becomes easier for us to pursue the payment for it. So it is a work in progress”
“One area that we do have challenges regarding cracking is actually the local government and the state government and that speaks to the question about the number of employees within our subscriber base. Someone spoke about the 7.6 million subscribers and expected that there would be much more. Of course, there should be much more than that if you expect all local governments of the federation to be subscribers, all state governments, coupled with various government employees.
“But we have seen that states are largely non-compliant. We intend to engage much more with state governments to bring the scheme to the sub-national level. We are pleased to announce that Lagos state is fully subscribed, and we are engaging with them to realize that we, as an example, will also encourage other states to follow suit,” Faleye added.
On NSITF initiatives and service delivery, Faleye stated that the agency is focused on improving its operations while evaluating past projects.
He emphasised that workplace safety remains a core focus for NSITF, with significant investments in health and safety awareness, audits, and training.
“The legal department does have a strategy of really going after subscribers or those that we feel are not paying what they should pay. So in terms of sanctions, we take them to court, and I think we’ve seen improvement from subscribers in that manner.
“So our strategy really going forward is undertake legal action, those that are not complying and of course more persuasion generally until we have a revamped enforcement powers from the National Assembly. Hopefully, we will get that. Once I leave today, and the head of legal affairs and I are heading to the National Assembly to continue the conversation around the reviews of our law with the mindset of getting much more enforcement powers,” he explained.
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