The National Pension Commission is planning to open offices in five zones in the country to enhance its activities and get closer to the people.
The offices, it was learnt on Thursday, would be cited in Gombe, Kano, Ilorin, Awka and Calabar to cover the different regions.
By this, the offices would be empowered to carry out pension duties, which hitherto were been done in Abuja, currently the only office available in the country.
The Chairman, Pension Operators Association of Nigeria, Mr. Dave Uduanu, said the operators had reviewed the developments in the pension industry from inception to date and tried to chart a new road map for the sector.
He said the regulator was ensuring that all state governments keyed into the Contributory Pension Scheme, adding that PenCom had released the guidelines so that state governments that wanted to access the pension fund by way of issuance of bonds would not only participate in the scheme, but be judicious in remitting the monthly contributions of workers.
For this reason, he said, the regulator had introduced more stringent requirements to ensure that the states would not stop contribute after accessing the fund.
“What we try to do is to equate pension payment with salaries and, therefore, put in place a mechanism to ensure that at the end of every month, paying pension would no longer be discretionary.
The whole idea, Uduanu added, was to make pension rank at par with salaries, noting that a greater percentage of the pension funds was allocated to the bond market, especially the Federal Government bonds.
The Pension Fund Administrators, he added, were working with the government to find ways through instruments, mechanisms and the money market to expose the funds to the real sector.
He said the PFAs were speaking with the regulator, the government and International Finance Corporations interested in growing the economy.
According to him, the more the real sector grows, the more employment will be created and the more the pension business will grow.