The Nigerian Bureau of Statistics has revealed that only 10.8 percent of Nigerian workers are captured under the contributory pension scheme while more than 89 percent of them are not registered.
A report released by the bureau on Monday indicates that the Retirement Savings Account, RSA, membership distribution data for the 4th quarter of 2016 reflected that 7,348,028 workers are registered under the pension scheme out of a total working population of 69,470,091.
The NBS explained that the trend is not surprising given the largely informal structure of the Nigerian labour force.
The report stated further that about 50 percent of the current workforce is engaged in subsistence agriculture and informal trading, noting that micro businesses for example account for over 90 per cent of total small, micro, and medium scale enterprises, SMEs, in Nigeria.
A further analysis of the report shows that the total male working population is 36,363,042, out of which only 5,226,897 or 14.37 percent are registered under the pension scheme.
Similarly, out of the 33,107,859 female working population, only 2,121,131 or 6.41 percent are captured under the scheme.
Analysis shows that the federal government had 1,866,850 registered RSA members under the national pension scheme as at Q4 2016 of which 1,363,266 (representing 73 percent) were male and 503,584 (representing 27 percent) were female.
According to the NBS, this implies that there are a lot more male employees in the federal public service than female.
At the state and local government levels, 1,508,471 state public workers are registered under the national pension scheme with 849,493 males representing 56.3 per cent and 658,978 females representing 43.7 per cent.
This may be an indication that the federal public service is larger than that of all 36 states combined.
The report also indicates that private firms had 3,972,707 registered RSA members under the pension scheme.
Out of this number, 3,014,138 or 75.9 percent were male, while 958,569 or 24.1 percent were female.
The NBS said among the three classes of workers registered under the scheme, private firms’ working population dominated the membership distribution and closely followed by the federal and state working population.
Analysis of the age distribution of workers shows that the highest number of registered working population came from the age bracket of 30-39 years, closely followed by the working population within the age bracket of 40-49 years and 50-59 years.