To make its operations more accessible in the South-East, the National Pension Commission has officially opened a zonal office in the region.
According to a statement on Saturday, the commission embarked on the establishment of zonal offices in the six geopolitical zones of the country in order to decentralise its activities and bring it closer to the contributors and retirees.
With the commission’s presence in the South-East zone, it stated that stakeholders in the pension industry could avail themselves of the services of the commission by visiting the zonal office to make enquiries, lodge complaints and seek education on the Contributory Pension Scheme or request for sensitisation and awareness on pension and pension related matters.
PenCom said due to its renewed focus on efficient services, it sought to reduce the need for contributors and retirees to travel from various parts of the country to Abuja for the singular reason of accessing the commission’s services.
It said the presence of the commission would facilitate a closer interaction with the states’ pension offices by assisting them to comply with the CPS.
The commission said that the South-East zonal office in Awka had the mandate to effectively extend its services to all the five states in the zone namely; Anambra, Enugu, Ebonyi, Imo and Abia.
The Acting Director-General, PenCom, Mrs. Chinelo Anohu-Amazu, noted that the commission had remained steadfast in the implementation of the CPS such that within its few years of existence, some modest achievements had been made.
She outlined such achievements as the consistent payment of retirement benefits to employees, who retired under the scheme since 2007 without the characteristic bottlenecks experienced in the past, the generation of investible funds of more than N3.72tn invested in various financial instruments and the registration of about 5.82 million contributors into the CPS.
The PenCom boss also added that the commission had made an input in the process of a major amendment to the Pension Reform Act 2004 currently at the final stage of consideration in the National Assembly.
