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Issues about pension elicit a lot of emotion, passion and discussion, simply because life during retirement can be quite challenging.
Contributors to the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) aspire to have a comfortable retirement and enjoy decent pension benefits, but that is not always the case.
In the early stages of life, we are mostly fascinated by what we want to become in the future and for that reason, we turn to focus more attention on doing things that lead us to achieve the very future we often dream to have.
While we make conscious efforts to pursue our dreams, we completely ignore or fail to consider the inevitable life we will have after achieving and living our dreams.
Life after retirement: Yes, Pension! That’s what I am referring to.
Most people do not even hear about or discuss pension (talk less of planning for it) until perhaps they are few years to retirement.
Parents, in the early stages of life of their children, are more concerned about the professional and vocational ambitions of those children than anything else, and for that matter, many children grow into adulthood with no knowledge of pension.
More worrying is the fact that the education curricula for all the academic levels in Ghana do not have space for pension or retirement issues and, therefore, when most people leave the university and find jobs for the very first time, they become completely oblivious of pension issues associated with employment despite their future implications.
Act
In Ghana, persons aged 15 and above are permitted by the National Pension Act, 2008 (Act 766), as amended, to be gainfully employed by any company.
A company, after engaging a person, is mandated by law to pay 18.5 per cent of the person’s basic salary as contributions to Tiers One and Two Pension schemes, of which that person is a member.
Notwithstanding the fact that the aforementioned is common knowledge and widely known, many workers do not take them seriously.
Some workers actually become aware of their employers’ continuous failure to pay their pension contributions until late, when they are about to retire, and are confronted with the reality of having to survive without a job.
Even though pension arrangements in Ghana are backed by laws which incidentally make it compulsory for every worker to be covered for pension under Tiers One and Two, that does not in, any form or shape, relieve workers from the responsibility of planning towards a decent retirement.
Regrettably, many workers have assumed the mandatory Tiers One and Two pension contributions to be sufficient and, for that reason, they do very little (in some cases nothing) about issues concerning pension.
It is very true that the Tiers One and Two pension schemes will provide income on retirement, but the million-dollar question that ought to be asked is, will it be adequate to meet all your needs during pension?
I believe this can be answered if we look deeply within ourselves and reassess our future aspirations and needs.
Pension
Pension is a delicate matter and obviously the most critical aspect of our life, but oftentimes it is relegated to the bottom of our priorities.
Life during retirement is supposed to be one of the best moments on earth, yet many pensioners have been killed by poverty before their time and others are enduring hardship mainly because they completely ignored the inevitable future of pension and failed to plan accordingly.
My uncle told me many years ago that “it was irrational for anyone to set aside money while working to cater for pension needs” because, in his opinion, the death of that person will make another “enjoy” the money that has been set aside.
Unfortunately for him, he is still full of life at 70 and currently depends on the support of family members to survive. I guess no one wants to have the kind of future my uncle has now.
So far as we do not set any date for our respective deaths, we ought to know that pension is an inevitable stage in life that will certainly come up at some point in time.
No one will give us better life on pension. Whatever we desire to become on pension depends on the decisions and the choices we make today.
Take your pension seriously and do not live your future to chance.
The writer is Senior Manager, Standards & Compliance, National Pensions Regulatory Authority (NPRA). Writer’s e-mail: frank.anderson@npra.gov.gh
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