By Emeka Anaeto
The National Pension Commission (PenCom) is set to refine its investment frameworks to direct pension capital into critical national assets, including infrastructure, energy, healthcare, and agriculture, while maintaining competitive returns for contributors.
These are some of the disclosures made by the PenCom Director-General, Ms. Omolola Oloworaran, at briefing in Abuja, where she outlined key achievements of the Commission in the last two years.
Meanwhile, in outlining the major milestones she indicated an injection of N10.7 trillion in new retirement savings into the national economy during the period which brought the total pension assets to N31.48 trillion as of July 10, 2026, a 51 percent expansion from N20.79 trillion in July 2024.
Oloworaran attributed the growth to aggressive recovery of unremitted contributions, flexible investment strategies, improved compliance, and tighter collaboration with anti-graft agencies such as the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC).
Looking ahead, the Commission outlined three upcoming initiatives including a health initiative set to be launched within three months with a pilot program to provide free health insurance to 30,000 low-income retirees, aged 60 and above earning N150,000 or less monthly, before expanding nationally.
The second initiative is a Minimum Pension Guarantee which is a structural floor to ensure no Contributory Pension Scheme (CPS) retiree falls below a guaranteed basic income.
The Commission also intends to initiate an informal sector expansion through a rollout of the Personal Pension Plan and a network of Accredited Pension Agents designed to extend coverage to traders, artisans, transport workers, and fintech users while creating job opportunities.
Alongside asset growth, coverage under the CPS widened significantly in the past two years, adding 938,229 new contributors to bring the total subscriber base from 10.42 million to 11.32 million workers.
PenCom also rolled out several interventions to boost retiree welfare including the Pension Boost 1.0 which increased aggregate monthly pension payouts by 22%, raising total monthly distributions from N12.2 billion to N14.9 billion.
The Commission also effected the consequential adjustment with over 195,000 eligible treasury-funded retirees who retired on or before July 29, 2024, receiving a N32,000 monthly increase to align with the new national minimum wage. There was also the NSITF Pension Review which marked the first upward review for Nigerian Social Insurance Trust Fund (NSITF) retirees in 21 years, yielding pension increases of up to 1,173% for individual beneficiaries, alongside the clearance of N8.7 billion in arrears owed to 2,116 retirees.
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