By Ralph Sesay
The National Social Security and Insurance Trust (NASSIT) is set to target the country’s informal sector, which remains the bulk of the workforce.
This disclosure was made by the Director General of the Trust, Mr. Mohamed Fuad Daboh, at a press briefing in Freetown.
The DG noted that 85% of the current active population, in Sierra Leone, is in the informal sector economy, but that since its creation the Trust has not been able to penetrate up to 2% of this population. This, according to the DG, was mainly because the designed features of NASSIT are not compatible with the operations of the informal sector, which, he emphasized, constitutes a reasonable number of the country’s business sector.
Mr. Daboh disclosed that the Trust will address the problem by rolling out an attractive social security scheme that, according to him, will appropriately address the special needs of workers in the sector of the economy.
The new DG has brought novelty in the operations of NASST, as he has vowed to venture into investment into student hostels, which has remained a perennial problem in most student campuses across the country.
The Trust, according to the DG, is in advanced talks with Gouiji Construction Company for the construction of five blocks of student hostels with ancillary facilities on five university campuses across the country. Each of the five campuses, he went on, will have a block comprising of 216 rooms with a facility for 432 students.
The forward looking DG has also announced his intention of investing in the construction of an ultra-modern diagnostic centre that, according to him, will help in addressing the current diagnostic facility gap faced by the country’s health system, while at the same time provide investment income in order to maintain the financial value of the scheme. This will enable the Trust to pay benefits as and when they fall due.
NASSIT has been criticized over the years for undertaking investments that have not moved towards addressing the critical development issues facing the country. The media and other CSOs have blasted the Scheme for lavishing huge sums of monies in investments that are viewed as wasting the people’s money.
This state of affairs is bound to change as the new administration is now venturing into construction of student hostels and medical infrastructure. It is hoped that it will also consider the critical issue of housing, which continues to plague government workers and the ordinary Sierra Leonean.