SSNIT worried over numbers of non-contributors

The Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) has expressed worry about the growing number of workers not on the pension scheme.

Out of the over 9.9 million salaried workers, only about 1.9 million pay their pension regularly.

If this persists, only 1.9 million workers stand the chance of benefiting from their pension contributions when they retire at 60, according to SSNIT.

SSNIT expressed concerns speaking at a workshop to educate some selected journalists on the relevance of SSNIT payments, during which the Head of Public Affairs at SSNIT, Charles Akwei Garshong, expressed worry about the low insurance contributions of salaried workers in the country.

He warned of dire economic consequences for uninsured workers when they hit the retirement age.

“At the moment, we have a very limited number, that is about 1.9 million workers contributing to the pension scheme. When you look at the breakdown, only close to 1.2 million employees in the private sector with only 38,000 self-employed are contributing to the scheme,” he revealed.

He believes regular engagement with the media can help improve pension contributions in the country.

“Once we sustain this education, and we always focus on reaching out to them irrespective of where they find themselves, whether online [or] their various places of work, we believe we will be able to help reduce old age poverty in the future by increasing more people on the scheme,” he said.

With SSNIT’s current base contribution rate of 13.5%, the private and public sectors contribute 62.14% and 36.03% respectively to SSNIT, while the self-employed contributes 1.82%.