Determinants of Financial Sustainability of Pension Fund Administrators in Nigeria

Financial sustainability of pension funds are often cited as essential determinants for ensuring the provision of safe and reliable pension for retirees and pensioners. Whether pension fund administrators will become part of a lasting solution to the pension financing problems in Nigeria or not depends on their ability to continue to grow, expand and sustain themselves over the course of time. Contemporary literatures on pension reforms identified financial sustainability as the key challenge of Pension Fund Administrators. This study, therefore, examines the determinants of financial sustainability of pension fund administrators in Nigeria. A positivism thought to epistemology guided by quantitative parametric pooled regression were used as paradigm and technique of analysis respectively . A data set of fifteen sampled pension fund administrators taking cognizance of Contribution, Size, Net income, Age, Board size And composition and GDP as independent variables were pooled and regressed against Sales scaled by total assets. The results indicate a positive and significant contribution of age, size, net income and contribution to financial sustainability of pension fund administrators. On the contrary, GDP, Board composition and board size, though, not significant displayed a negative contribution to financial sustainability of pension fund administrators in Nigeria. Conclusively, the result inferred that the level of sustainability today will affect the sustainability tomorrow regardless of where the pension fund administrator stands in its life cycle or developmental stage. Therefore, the study recommends amongst others a close monitoring and swift actions to remedying any weakness in Pension Fund Administrators.

Before April 1974, gratuity and pension for public servants were not treated as rights but as privileges in Nigeria.. However, from 1974, with the amendment of section 6 (1) of the pension law, they became rights which an entitled public servant could claim from the government. This general Pension scheme for civil servants was financed from government general revenue on a ‗pay –as-you-go‘ basis and not from a special fund established for the purpose. Under the pensions Act of 1979, both gratuity and pension were salary rate related and were financed wholly by the government without any contribution by the workers. In contrast, government parastatals tended to operate separate funded schemes which required setting aside on an annual basis, a percentage of the total basic salaries of their staff in a special fund under the management of a board of trustees.

The National Provident Fund (NPF) Act provided for private sector pension schemes. Originally,NPF, a contributory scheme, which was established in 1961, also covered public servants. It was wound up for public servants after it has lost N17bn in corruption. Unlike the public sector, most in-house pension schemes in the Nigerian private sector were funded by both the employers and employees (Ije, 2001). The employees contributed a percentage of their monthly salaries, subject to a maximum and the employers also contributed certain percentage of employees‘ salary to the scheme. Considering the benefits resulting from the statutory scheme, individual companies tended to operate their own company and administered contributing gratuity schemes to supplement the statutory retirement gratuity scheme.