By JOACHIM BUWEMBO

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Uganda’s National Social Security Fund is in the news for the wrong reason. Over the past decade plus, it has been doing a good job and nobody wanted to know. Well, not many wanted to know because, as cynics say, no news is good news.

So NSSF was, for a decade, paying double-digit annual interest to its savers and the public looked the other way. It grew to be the biggest such fund in the region, with about $5 billion, as people yawned.

Then Covid-19 came, the country was locked down, and the scramble for every perceivable cash was targeted. Members of Parliament gave themselves a quick $6,000 each and even President Yoweri Museveni’s attempt to stop them did not succeed. He resigned to verbally rebuking them as “morally reprehensible,” but they sneered back by passing a motion of displeasure against him.

Then some populist unionists and MPs mooted a motion to enable NSSF savers who attain 45 years pick up 20 percent of their benefits as emergency relief. The NSSF management fought hard against it, explaining that workers’ money is invested in long-term assets and doling out the proposed one-fifth would reduce the ability to pay a good interest. But they were shut down as the MPs passed the motion.

Then, as last year came to a close, the contract of the Fund’s CEO Richard Byarugaba expired and certain forces were quick to point out that he was not eligible to a renewal because he had clocked 60. The board had recommended a renewal. Though later it transpired that the law did not bar NSSF contracting someone on grounds of age, a lot of heckling had happened and the President ordered a probe before renewal.

A few unpleasant things have been said about the fund’s management, and outrightly shocking things have emerged about government officials with power over the CEO’s contract, including eyebrow-raising attempts to use workers’ cash to fund government functions that should be funded by the annual national budget from the Treasury.

And the bizarre litany continues.

The real sin NSSF committed is succeeding in a sea of failure. The stunted saving culture in Uganda is such that most private sector workers have no savings by retirement at age 55, except what is in their NSSF account. Public sector workers largely don’t save because they expect the taxpayer to pay them hefty terminal benefits and even a monthly pension until death. It is possible that NSSF holds more savings for people than any bank in Uganda.

Now here is the shocker, which shouldn’t be a shocker because it is public knowledge: NSSF active members constitute less than five percent of the national workforce, yet there is no hullaballoo over the retirement savings of the other 95 percent. Because those savings don’t exist. If the NSSF had been performing as pathetically as the country’s other retirement savings efforts, nobody would bother about it.

The smart thing that should have been done by yesterday is to institute compulsory savings for all formal workers. If you add up teachers, disciplined forces and the traditional civil service, you could have about the same number as the active NSSF members. That will be a second pot of savings growing at the same rate as the NSSF.

Private sector employers who are obliged to remit workers’ savings — five percent of their pay plus 10 percent contributed by the employer — have for long been those with five or more employees, but now the drive is on to make all employers, however few their workers, remit.

If compulsory savings covered all the 15 million or so working persons, workers’ savings would probably be growing by $1 billion per year, not the mere $100 million or so growing through NSSF.

You know what happens when anarchy breaks out in a society, any society and it could be caused by and electricity or a coup d’etat: Looting against those who have happens. NSSF is in that precarious position and MPs ordered its coffers broken when Covid happened to feed the masses for a couple of days. What is not publicised is that many eligible people simply refused to apply for their 20 percent, while many conmen tried to apply.

Savings is a state of mind. All workers should be compelled to save monthly until their mindset adjusts to it.

Buwembo is a Kampala-based journalist. E-mail:[email protected]