By Executive Editor
About 80% members of the National Social Security Fund – NSSF – have less than Shs 10 million in balances.
This was revealed by the acting NSSF Managing Director – Patrick Ayota (pictured) in a one-on-one interview with NTV’s Raymond Mujuni last Saturday.
During the interview, Ayota revealed that: “We have right now about 80% of our members with less than 10 million shillings in balances.”
“Somebody has been working maybe for the last 20 years and at 55, he comes back and he gets 8 million because of how the labor market is structured,” Ayota said.
Ayota says it is high time Uganda addressed social security visa-vie the labor market because “social security is part and parcel of the labor market.”
“It touches on the labor market. People don’t work all the time, people drop in and out of work, people don’t have any safety networks, so there is a bigger issue we need to solve if people are going to have some level of retirement when they expire. But also the thing that the amendments addressed is to allow us on our own now to say, okay, 15% of my salary is not going to be enough when I retire, let me begin to save some more. If we do that and we fix our labor market, then that actually is a model that works,” Ayota says.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) puts NSSF members at 2.54 million (as of 2019).
The Fund is currently worth over Shs 18 trillion and expects to be at Shs 20 trillion by 2025.
