The National Social Security and Insurance Trust (NASSIT) was established by law to administer the payment of Social Security benefits.
According to Mr. Edwin Kamara, Head of Benefits at NASSIT, in 2004 the Government of Sierra Leone had an agreement with NASSIT to start administering the payment of government pensioners formerly paid by the Accountant General’s Department.
This, according to him, was because NASSIT had the technical capacity to deal with issues relating to the administration of pensions.
Government Pensions, Mr. Kamara went on, are divided into various categories and established by various government laws and regulations. He stated that, for example, Members of Parliament automatically become government pensioners after serving two terms in the House. This category, according to him, is quite different from the NASSIT pensioners who should have served for particular years to be entitled to our pensions.
The Head of Benefit furthered that, even when they had been established as an institution to pay pensions, the Government of Sierra Leone is still paying pensions. The rates we used to pay government pensioners are often determined by government, which we have no option but to strictly follow as a Trust.
He noted that the problems associated with the WIA scheme are often caused by the practice, which normally requires government to do annual verifications on all government pensioners annually.
This, according to him, is normally done outside NASSIT by teams from Ministry of Labour and Social Security and Finance, Accountant General and the Sierra Leone Labour Congress.
The feedback, in terms of verified personnel, is often communicated to NASSIT by the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Labour.
“This is what we would use to pay the pensioners. Most times the feedback comes in after we would have processed the normal pensions which we do against the 18th of every month,” Mr. Kamara disclosed.
Mr. Edwin Kamara concluded by expressing his frustration at the behavior of WIA members who would always involve in actions that disrupt and threaten the normal work and peace at their various offices.
“The delay in payments of WIA is not the making of NASSIT which only deals with instruction from Government.”
He noted that if government wants to conduct a verification of government pensioners they would normally zero the payroll and would only activate it when they get the results of the verified pensioners.
It could be recalled that NASSIT has over 18,000 government pensioners who are very well managed and are very satisfied with the management of their pensions.
Many workers, especially at the Benefit section of NASSIT, informed this medium that they would one day wake up one morning and hear that WIA pensions have been removed from the NASSIT system. This is because even though WIA is just less than 1% of government pensioners they continue to create serious headache for the work of NASSIT by refusing to understand, hence creating very unpleasant scenes at their various offices.