The Minister of Labour and Employment, Chris Ngige, has directed the management of the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund (NSITF) to review the staff salary structure of the Fund.
Ngige who said the directive was an ultimatum at the closing ceremony of a two-day Management Performance Review of NSITF over the weekend in Abuja, went on to give the agency three months deadline to fully effect the adjustment.
“Other incentives will follow and will be tied to performance. If you improve your contributions before the end of March, all your allowances will be reviewed. So all the staff must sit up. A new system is here to reward hard work. The era of clocking at 8:30 am to sleep and clocking out at 4 pm is over.
“The more target you meet in terms of returns, generation of contributions, the more the incentive. When you exceed your target, there must be a way of saying thank you. You must live down the NSITF of old and brace up for the new NSITF, where there will be special promotions for outstanding performance. There will also be a review of the condition of service.”
Furthermore, Ngige charged the management to fully automate the operations of the agency within three months, in line with global trends.
His words: “Information on every aspect of this agency should prop up on a touch of a button. It saves cost, saves time, promotes synergy, efficiency and transparency which is a bulwark against fraud. You must achieve this in three months. Both ITF and FIRS are organisations you should be competing with, but they have left you behind.”
Also, he directed that the Management Performance Review be made more frequent, especially for those in operations, using virtual platforms, to bridge the gap in communication between the branches, zones and the headquarters, so as to properly ventilate every issue and carry along, all levels before decisions are taken.
The Minister re-stated that every contract must be in line with the Procurement Act and must be done based on NEEDS assessment, vowing that the era of procurement just for sake of it was over.
“When you visit some branches, you find items of furniture, some new, dumped all over the place. They were procured for sake of buying them and not based on the needs of the branches. This must stop.”
He again charged the legal department to pick up the challenge and charge recalcitrant employers to court, directing that the legal department be established in every branch. He said additional recruitment of lawyers and accountants was done to firm up operations and there should be no excuses hence.
“How many persons have you taken to court? We are amending the law so that the penalty will be stiff. But you must take people to court even if the fine is N10, 000. The law says N10,000 or six months imprisonment or both. A magistrate or judge might not give you N10, 000 only, he might give you both or even give you six months only. And once you are given six months and you come out, you become an ex-convict. If it is a company, it will be blacklisted. So, nobody should say the law is loose and hide under it not to perform.”
Ngige further called for the re-enforcement of the Informal Sector Department of the agency as he described the informal economy as one whole opportunity waiting to be tapped for the social security benefits of all.
The review, a quarterly, which was the first since the new management took office last year, had in attendance, all branch and regional managers as well as other senior and executive management of the agency.
The Managing Director of the Fund, Dr Mike Akabogu, had earlier said the decision to invite the branch managers to take the lead in the presentation was part of the new strategic management system that prioritizes horizontal leadership.
He further said the agency was being reformed to raise the bar of performance, hence the need for continuous cross-level engagement of the workforce to engender synergy needed for the achievement of target goals.