Ngige wants private sector in NSITF scheme

Minister of Labour and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige, has urged the management of the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund (NSITF) to extend the Employee Compensation Scheme (ECS) to the private sector.

Ngige, who gave the advice on a visit to the corporate headquarters of NSITF in Abuja, also demanded the prosecution of all companies that had defaulted in complying with the ECS.

The acting Managing Director of the Fund, Ismail Agaka said that NSITF has so far registered about 51,576 employers since inception, 16,909 of them between January and November 2016.

Senator Ngige said the ECS was a beneficial scheme that should involve everybody in the country, and even people in the informal sector.

“I want the NSITF to drag more recalcitrant companies to court over infractions. And I want as many companies as possible to go to court for not obeying the law of the land, and the legal department must be active in this regard. The companies that are not complying are shortchanging their workers because, in those places, workers are still treating themselves when they sustain an injury in the course of work. This is completely unfair and the government will not sit by and watch Nigerian workers suffer unnecessarily,” he declared.

“We want the little money they earn to stay in their pockets. Employers have a responsibility towards their employees and they must be made to fulfill those responsibilities, which employees’ compensation scheme is a major part.”

He said many employers of labour in the country were cheating their workers who spend their own money to treat themselves, especially when involved in industrial accidents.

The minister, who said the Fund had not lived up to the expectations, challenged the management to spread the dragnet and carry out a compulsory turnaround of the fund in other to achieve its mandate of providing social protection for Nigerian workers.

According to him, the ECS was one of the nine social security initiatives contained in the International Labour Organization Convention 102, adding that the Nigerian government was doing everything possible to domesticate the convention which also includes health Insurance and conditional cash transfer.