Why the NSITF Urgently Needs to Be Repositioned as Social Insurance, By 'Tope Fasua
The scope of the NSITF must be very national. His skill should be every suffering Nigerian everywhere. Imagine that the country is now overwhelmed by floods and not a word from a SOCIAL INSURANCE TRUST FUND. A fund into which – like TETFUND – Nigerian companies pay incredible sums waiting to be misappropriated! We can see the impact of TETFUND in our higher education institutions; can't we? Where is the impact of the NSITF?…indeed, the process of reviewing and resetting the purpose of this fund should begin now.
What comes to your mind whenever this company called NSITF (National Social Insurance Trust Fund) is in the news? Fraud. It's true. The new keys that arise from this organization concern embezzlement and mismanagement. The latest bad news - after some quiet - is that an organization official has claimed that receipts and documents that are several years old may have been swallowed by termites, as they were stored in some containers at the outside their premises. The amount in dispute is N17.85 billion. This statement was of course slightly sensationalized by the media and became another embarrassment to the government as a whole, as the NSITF had to pull pages from the newspapers to explain what their official meant and so on. .
However, people are fed up with these explanations and a permanent chasm seems to have turned into a chasm between the rulers and the ruled, the government and the people. So I was upset when sometime last year I received a letter from the NSITF saying they were planning to come and inspect the books of my small business. Indeed, it was the first time that an agency had come to inspect – apart from our regulator, of course. Why would the NSITF bother me in my office? I wasn't even happy to pay them, but I'm required to by statute. Outside of the NSITF, every year I make payments to the Industrial Training Fund (ITF), remit to trustees of staff pension funds, obtain a certificate from the National Pensions Commission (PENCOM), and, of course, I pay corporate income tax and personal income tax. All works.
So I replied to the NSITF that while they are interested in inspecting our books for compliance and ownership, I was also interested in getting an explanation for some of the egregious waste of the money we had for them paid in 16 years of our operations. I have detailed some of the scandals in the newspapers regarding the fund as follows:
Ministry accuses NSITF leadership of 3.4 billion naira fraud (Premium Times, July 4, 2020); Fraud: FG discovers 62.555 billion naira not accounted for in NSITF (Nairametrics, 19,19 July 2018); Reps to Prove N2.3 Billion NSITF Fraud (The Nation, December 18, 2019); FG Inaugurates Panel to Probe Alleged Fraud against NSITF MD, Others (ThisDay, July 16, 2020); $4 Billion NSITF Fraud: Ubani Pulls Bail for Olejeme, Blasts Magu (DailyPost, April 17, 2021); Another alleged NSITF 48 billion naira fraud scandal (National Daily, July 22, 2020); Suspected N18bn fraud: EFCC Arraigns ex-NSITF Boss, 4 Others. (Blue...
The scope of the NSITF must be very national. His skill should be every suffering Nigerian everywhere. Imagine that the country is now overwhelmed by floods and not a word from a SOCIAL INSURANCE TRUST FUND. A fund into which – like TETFUND – Nigerian companies pay incredible sums waiting to be misappropriated! We can see the impact of TETFUND in our higher education institutions; can't we? Where is the impact of the NSITF?…indeed, the process of reviewing and resetting the purpose of this fund should begin now.
What comes to your mind whenever this company called NSITF (National Social Insurance Trust Fund) is in the news? Fraud. It's true. The new keys that arise from this organization concern embezzlement and mismanagement. The latest bad news - after some quiet - is that an organization official has claimed that receipts and documents that are several years old may have been swallowed by termites, as they were stored in some containers at the outside their premises. The amount in dispute is N17.85 billion. This statement was of course slightly sensationalized by the media and became another embarrassment to the government as a whole, as the NSITF had to pull pages from the newspapers to explain what their official meant and so on. .
However, people are fed up with these explanations and a permanent chasm seems to have turned into a chasm between the rulers and the ruled, the government and the people. So I was upset when sometime last year I received a letter from the NSITF saying they were planning to come and inspect the books of my small business. Indeed, it was the first time that an agency had come to inspect – apart from our regulator, of course. Why would the NSITF bother me in my office? I wasn't even happy to pay them, but I'm required to by statute. Outside of the NSITF, every year I make payments to the Industrial Training Fund (ITF), remit to trustees of staff pension funds, obtain a certificate from the National Pensions Commission (PENCOM), and, of course, I pay corporate income tax and personal income tax. All works.
So I replied to the NSITF that while they are interested in inspecting our books for compliance and ownership, I was also interested in getting an explanation for some of the egregious waste of the money we had for them paid in 16 years of our operations. I have detailed some of the scandals in the newspapers regarding the fund as follows:
Ministry accuses NSITF leadership of 3.4 billion naira fraud (Premium Times, July 4, 2020); Fraud: FG discovers 62.555 billion naira not accounted for in NSITF (Nairametrics, 19,19 July 2018); Reps to Prove N2.3 Billion NSITF Fraud (The Nation, December 18, 2019); FG Inaugurates Panel to Probe Alleged Fraud against NSITF MD, Others (ThisDay, July 16, 2020); $4 Billion NSITF Fraud: Ubani Pulls Bail for Olejeme, Blasts Magu (DailyPost, April 17, 2021); Another alleged NSITF 48 billion naira fraud scandal (National Daily, July 22, 2020); Suspected N18bn fraud: EFCC Arraigns ex-NSITF Boss, 4 Others. (Blue...What's Your Reaction?
