By Adedapo Adesanya
The National Pension Commission (PenCom) has clarified that no official under its employment collects up to N1 million as salary as alleged.
The clarification followed a report claiming that the least paid PenCom employee earns a salary of N3 million per month.
According to the company, “it has become necessary to set the record straight in the interest of the Nigerian public.”
In a press release seen by Business Post, PenCom disregarded the source of information, adding that, “The public is invited to note that the claim is false. The highest-paid official of the commission earns less than N1 million a month. It is, therefore, completely illogical and improbable that the least paid will earn a monthly salary of N3 million.”
According to the pension industry regulator, the news report has fueled all sorts of false allegations and unfair insinuations.
“We understand that there is an element of mischief and possible blackmail on the Commission’s compensation package. From our understanding, it appears someone calculated all staff costs, including training, staff exit benefit scheme, and employer’s pension contribution, and divided the total by the number of the commission’s employees and concluded that the least paid employee is on a monthly salary of N3 million. There is a clear difference between staff cost and staff salaries,” the statement said.
It clarified that since the inception of the commission in 2004, the federal government mandated the board to adopt an employee compensation policy that favourably compares to comparator government bodies in the financial services sector, such as the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Section 25(2)(b) of the Pension Reform Act 2014 also empowers the Board of the Commission to fix the remuneration, allowances, and benefits of the employees.
It advised that the Presidential Committee on the Consolidation of Emoluments in the Public Sector, headed by the late Chief Ernest Shonekan, former Head of the Interim National Government, made some recommendations that guide the PenCom Board in its compensation review exercises.
One recommendation is that “the pay structure of self-funded agencies should be benchmarked with their private sector comparators to ensure relativity in such agencies and attract and retain high-calibre professionals.”
The Shonekan Committee, which former President Olusegun Obasanjo set up in 2005, also recommended that the pay structure of regulatory agencies should be benchmarked against sectors they monitor to avoid regulatory capture and that an annual increase in pay should be undertaken to account for inflation/cost of living adjustment and establishments may strive to attain 50th percentile and above their comparators in the private sector.
PenCom noted that it had made this clear in a recent submission to the House of Representatives Committee on Finance over the compensation package of the Commission.
“We also stated that the last compensation package review was done in 2017 with the approval of the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (OSGF). No review has been done in the last five years, and this has affected the agency’s ability to attract, hire and retain staff with competitive skills.”
“The public is implored to ignore the false and mischievous information on the staff compensation package. The Commission has nothing to hide and will continue to run a transparent and accountable system,” it hammered.
Modupe Gbadeyanka