The Nigeria Labour Congress has warned Nigerian governors to bury the thought of borrowing from the workers pension to finance ‘infrastructure’
Governors had disclosed plans to borrow N17 trillion from the pension funds purportedly for infrastructural development.
Speaking at the 47th National Executive Council meeting of the Medical and Health Workers’ Union of Nigeria, in Abuja on Thursday, the NLC President, Ayuba Wabba, insisted that the governors have no authority over the funds.
Ayuba said, “The pension is not for borrowing, pension money is the retirement savings of workers, it cannot be borrowed. It’s like money in your savings account that nobody can borrow.
“You must go through the bank and in this case, you must go through the PFAs and their guidelines; even the guidelines they want to play down but to the glory of God, the board of Pencom commission has been constituted.
“I stand here to represent all of you (workers), we are not going to agree; less than 5 per cent of the states are keying into the contributory pension, yet they want to borrow the money. The bulk of the money is from the federal government workers and private-sector workers; so how do you want to borrow from where you have not sown?”
The NLC leader lamented that over 18 state governments were delaying the implementation of the new national minimum wage, noting that it was unheard of that the same governments would want to borrow the workers’ pension.
“It’s not free money, and let me sound a bit of warning: any day that we hear the pension fund, our money has been borrowed, I will declare a protest and everybody is going to be on the street to protect our hard-earned money.
“The money belongs to workers, we contribute that money so that when we retire, we can have something for retirement, so they have no say whatsoever; both the principal and the capital belong to us,” he said.
