FIWON Wants Implementation of Micro Pension Scheme For Self Employed

FIWON May Day Statement

The 2019 May Day is taking place against the backdrop of continued, unabating human suffering in Nigeria. While critical services such as electricity and potable water supply remains rocket science that defies solution, essential services especially functional public education, healthcare services, sanitation, basic shelter and modern transportation infrastructure especially roads and railways remain in the realms of endless promises. While youth unemployment remains dangerously high, self-employed people working in the informal economy, despite all rhetoric, remain essentially neglected and subject to unrelenting exploitation, wanton harassment and unjustified criminalization. We are also worried that the scepter of insecurity threatens to engulf even more spaces in the country as the Zamfara and the Northeast bloodletting seem to defy solution. While a few individuals continue to celebrate their billions of dollars and men of power especially our legislators continue to enjoy their multimillion monthly salaries, most states in the federation still shortchange workers of the full payment of the old minimum wage of N18, 000 as workers are paid meager percentages of the old minimum wage. It is clear that the new minimum wage of N30, 000 will not be paid by most state employers in Nigeria without stiff battles by organized labour. It is against this background that we congratulate Nigerian workers on the occasion of the 2019 Labour Day while calling on all to actually gird their loins for titanic struggles for life and breath in the coming months.

Indeed we use the occasion of the 2019 May Day to express our unalloyed solidarity with the overwhelming numbers of working masses in the Nigerian informal economy. Apart from the indignities of daily harassments on the streets, we deplore the institutional criminalization meted out to informal workers. It is against this backdrop that we condemn unequivocally the passage of a new Bill by the Nigerian Senate to clamp down on informal workers. The Bill sponsored by Senator Dino Melaye (PDP, Kogi) was read for the first time on the 28th of March, 2017. The new Bill empowers the National Orientation Agency (NOA) to collaborate with the federal, state and local governments in the eradication of social vices such as street hawking, cultism, armed robbery and exam malpractices through social enlightenment programmes. Since when has street vending/hawking/trading which even the U.K. Parliament in 2015 acknowledged was part of the British tradition and which India, in 2014, nationally recognized with a law, to protect and the defend the rights of street vendors through the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihoods and Regulation of Street Vending) Act 2014, making vending a right, become a crime? It is instructive that the Indian Supreme court in 2018 reinforces this law when it ruled that footpaths are made for both pedestrians and street vendors (See https://www.deccanchronicle.com/nation/current-affairs/161118/footpaths-meant-for-pedestrians-and-vendors-says-supreme-court.html). This mindset that criminalizes poor working people in the informal economy is also reflected in similar laws and edicts by state and local governments that target street vendors and other informal workers for persecution, arrests and criminalization. The Hawking Bye Law 2002 of the Abuja Municipal Area Council and the Street Trading Prohibition Law of the Lagos State government fall in this category. We call for the abrogation of these vicious insensitive laws while we call for the speedy passage of the highly progressive Bill for the Establishment of a Special Commission for the Regulation and Protection of Street Traders in Nigeria patterned after the 2014 Indian Street Vendors Act of 2014, introduced by Hon. Linus Okorie

We also use this occasion to call on the Federal Government to make the recently launched Micro Pension Scheme for the self employed meaningful. As it is, the Scheme will only remain in the annals of pious declaration on the part of the Federal Government if informal workers are just to contribute to the scheme without any form of support in the form of part funding by the government. It is also ridiculous that the people already over 60 years are also expected to be contributing to the pension fund. If people start contributing at 60 years and above, when do they start to enjoy the pension? Sadly, we also note that the Pension Fund Administrators are already complaining about the impossible conditions being dictated by the Pension Commission (PENCOM) set up by the federal government to regulate the pensions system in the country. We ask, why are policies affecting the overwhelming population of informal workers always difficult? In this vein, we call on broader stake holder consultation on the operationalization of the Pension Reform Act 2014 rather than the slow piece -meal lead we have been having from PENCOM since 2014. More importantly, we also call on the Federal Ministry of National Planning to subject the recently launched National Policy on Social Protection to stakeholder, public scrutiny and participation. In line with the Sustainable Development Goal 11 and the UN New Urban Agenda, social protection is a human right and a prerequisite for peaceful, sustainable and inclusive development. Hence its implementation must also be inclusive and serious minded!

It is equally important to comment about the deplorable state of human development services in Nigeria. Not only the federal government is continually under budgeting for critical social services such as education and healthcare, states such as Lagos, Oyo, Osun and Ogun State in the Southwest of Nigerian, historically renowned for its regional high human development legacy are not only underfunding education and social services, they also subject the human resources; the academic staff and the students to unprecedented repression and continuous state of instability. The point must be made that working people in both informal and formal sectors have no other option than functional public education and healthcare services. We cannot not continue to tolerate the systematic destruction of publicly provided social goods and services, because the toll is already too high; one of the highest maternal mortality and under-5 mortality rates in the world and a growing population of functional illiterates in a knowledge driven world!

Finally, we also use this occasion to demand that the federal government should reverse with immediate effect, the fraudulent and absolutely criminal ‘privatization’ of the electricity power sector. Despite bail outs at public expense, despite increases in tariffs, the operators in the power sector have proved signally incapable of making any positive difference as communities erupt in incessant protests over criminal over billing and refusal to provide metered payment for services and micro enterprises suffer and close down further because of power outages, aggravating the unemployment scourge in the country.

Gbenga Komolafe

General Secretary