PenCom commissions South-East Zonal Office

Determined to continue with its decentralisation effort geared towards ensuring increased accessibility to its offices and staff by contributors and retirees, the National Pension Commission (PenCom) has opened the South-East Zonal Office in Awka, Anambra State.

Three zonal offices had earlier been commissioned at Calabar for the South-South States, Ilorin for the North-Central States and Lagos for the South-West States.

The National Pension Commission embarked on the establishment of zonal offices in the six geo-political zones of the country so as to decentralize its activities and bring it closer to the contributors and retirees. With the Commission’s presence in the South-East Zone, stakeholders in the pension industry can now avail themselves of the services of the Commission by visiting the zonal office to make enquiries, lodge complaints, and seek education to the Contributory Pension Scheme and request for sensitization and awareness on pension and pension related matters.

Committed to efficient service, it seeks 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. In addition, the Presence of the Commission will facilitate closer interaction with the states’ pension offices by assisting them to comply with the Contributory Pension Scheme. The South-East Zonal office in Awka has the mandate to effectively extend the Commission’s services to all the five states in the zone namely; Anambra, Enugu, Ebonyi, Imo and Abia.

Chinelo Anohu-Amazu, acting director general, PenCom noted that the Commission had remained steadfast in the implementation of the Contributory Pension Scheme such that within its few years of existence, some modest achievements have been realised. She outlined such achievements as the consistent payment of the retirement benefits to all employees who retired under the scheme since 2007 without the characteristic bottlenecks experienced in the past, the generation of investible funds of more than 3.72 trillion naira invested in various financial instruments and the registration of about 5.82 million contributors into the Contribution Pension Scheme.

She nonetheless regretted that the South-East Zone known to be highly industrious and possessing enterprising intellectuals, was yet to take its rightful place in the adoption and implementation of the Contributory Pension Scheme (CPS), appealing to  the States not to be left out of a national success story which is what the Contributory Pension Scheme has become. According to her, the Commission was currently exploring the possibility of allowing contributors to utilize part of their Retirement Savings Account balance to part-finance the acquisition of homes, pointing out that these facilities would be availed only to states that have fully embraced the scheme.