President must cancel all those NSSF projects without value to pensioners

Labour secretary Kazungu Kambi has invited anti-corruption authorities to investigate whether the controversial Tassia project being implemented by the NSSF was procured irregularly. (READ: Anti-graft agency to grill NSSF big shots)

He has missed the point completely. What is needed is a comprehensive audit to determine the project’s feasibility and show whether it represents value for money for the pensioner.

I was surprised to read a statement by the CEO of the Federation of Kenya Employers, Ms Jacquline Mugo, a long-term serving director of the NSSF, that no feasibility study had been conducted on the Tassia project. How on earth would anyone go into such a huge project without conducting a feasibility study?

Billions of shillings of pensioners’ money was spent on purchasing the land. Hundreds of millions of shillings were spent on paying consultants, and on costly litigation.

Now the NSSF wants to spend another Sh5 billion in civil works, pretending that this is a requirement imposed on them by the county government.

Why don’t they sell the land as undeveloped plots? And where is the evidence that the tenants, who incidentally, are in possession of the houses already, are capable of paying for the expensive civil works propose for the estate?

The Tassia project should be cancelled – fast. (READ: Tassia row headed for a messy ending)

Who will protect the interests of the ordinary pensioner who contributes his meagre savings to the NSSF every month but is destined to get only a paltry one-off lump-sum payment when he retires?

In the private sector, members of private pension schemes get yearly statements which make it possible for them to track how their savings are growing, and to hold trustees to account on how their money has been invested.

The NSSF is a dark hole. On retirement, you get what you are offered without questioning.

I had hoped the new regime of President Uhuru Kenyatta would herald the beginning of real change in the running of the pensioners’ body.

I was wrong. The NSSF remains firmly in the clutches of a tiny elite that has lined up several multi-billion-shilling property development projects from where they hope to reap hundreds of millions in economic rent.

It is a very powerful network. Last year, they easily lobbied MPs to pass a new law to allow the NSSF to increase contribution rates. The real intention was to boost NSSF’s cash flow and thus make it possible for the Fund to finance the billion-shilling projects in the pipeline.

Such is the influence of this tiny elite that, last year, they influenced the Cabinet to approve a plan to build 3,000 houses in Mavoko. Since when did NSSF’s investment plans become a matter for the Cabinet?

The NSSF plans to build a multi-billion-shilling shopping mall on Kenyatta Avenue. How will that help the pensioner?

Indeed, the fight over Tassia was not about protecting the interest of the ordinary pensioner. It was about politics of big projects and competition between influential local groups fighting to secure lucrative contracts on behalf of Chinese contractors.

The NSSF has never effected a single major property development project without reports of corrupt dealings.

Successive reports of the Kenya National Audit Office have catalogued several cases where the Fund paid hundreds of millions of shillings to contractors for projects without any value to the pensioner,

President Kenyatta should cancel all those kickback-motivated projects that have been put in the pipeline by rent-seekers and their Chinese allies.

The Mohammed Abdikadir-led task force on parastatals made some very good suggestions. The government must admit that it does not own a cent in the NSSF and that its responsibility does not go beyond the fiduciary responsibility of protecting the interest of the public.

All those permanent secretaries who sit on the board of the NSSF to represent the government should go.

The recently introduced NSSF Act must be repealed and the Fund allowed to run under the Retirement Benefits Authority.

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