89% of Nigerian Workers Dont Have Retirement Plan -NBS

Over 89 per cent of the Nigerian working population do not have a plan for their retirement, latest data by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) have shown. According to the data board, only 10.8 per cent of the 69.47 million working population have retirement plans.NBS in a report released yesterday titled Retirement Savings Account (RSA) Membership Distribution said only 7.35 million workers are registered under the pension scheme as at the end of December 2016.This the data board said is not surprising given the largely informal structure of the Nigerian labor force with about 50 per cent of the current workforce engaged in subsistence agriculture and informal trading. Micro businesses for example account for over 90 per cent of total Micro, Small and Medium Scale Enterprises in Nigeria.Further disaggregation of RSA membership reveal that of a total male working population of 36.36 million, only 14.37 per cent or 5.22 million male workers are registered under the scheme. Similarly, only 2.12 million or 6.41 per cent out of a total female working population of 33.11 million are registered under the scheme.Accordingly, out of the 7.34 million RSA members, 71.13 per cent were men and only 28.87 per cent were women. This can be compared with the gender split of the working population which has 52.3 per cent men and 47.7 per cent women. As should be expected, RSA membership is dominated by the Private sector.The federal level had 1.86 million registered RSA members under the national pension scheme as at Q4 2016 of which 1.36 million or 73 per cent were male and 503,584 or 27 per cent are female. This may indicate that there are a lot more male employees in the Federal public service than female.At the state and local government level, 1.51 million state public workers are registered under the national pension scheme with 849,493 or 56.3 per cent male and 658,978 or 43.7 per cent female. This may indicate that the Federal Public Service is larger than that of all 36 States combined and similar to the Federal service, men dominate with respect to number of employees.Private firms had 3.97 million registered RSA members under the pension scheme as of Q4 2016 of which 3.01 million o or 75.9 per cent were male and 958,569 or 24.1 per cent female. Among the three classes of workers registered under the scheme, private firms working population dominated the membership distribution and closely followed by the federal and state working population.The highest number of registered working population came from the age bracket of 30-39yrs and closely followed by the working population within the age bracket of 40-49yrs and 50-59yrs. This is expected considering ages 25-44 account for about 55% of the total working population However, the least number of registered working population came from above 65yrs and 60-65yrs age bracket.
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