It is difficult being a senior citizen in Nigeria, a country with zero social safety net for old people. Yet by 2056, every 25-year-old today would have clocked 65, the official retirement age in Nigeria.

To remember old age is to take note of the challenges that come with it. At sixty-five, you have a high chance of developing some chronic health condition, which will in turn shoot up health related bills. If you know any old person, then you may have heard them complain of one or a combination of these health issues: arthritis, rheumatism, diabetes, high blood pressure, glaucoma, cataract, osteoporosis and many more. The list is endless. At that point, you also need to maintain a decent standard of living, needing to pay special attention to your diets, eating more of fruits and vegetables to build resistance against illnesses and diseases.

As the need to increase expenditure rises, your capacity to earn decreases. In old age, you are either no longer working or you are just working little – as your strength can carry you – with its attendant reduction in income. You will be needing most money at a time you are only able to make the least of it. This means the only time to take care of that future is now, when you are still young, strong and less prone to ailments that will limit your capacity to earn.

But how many people think there’s a need to save for their old age? Not much. And we have statistics to prove this. By the end of March this year, only 7.01 million Nigerians have registered with the Nigerian Contributory Pensions Scheme, a social safety programme aimed at catering for the retirement needs of workers. The law establishing the pension scheme, called the Pensions Reform Act 2014, mandated employers in the formal sector to also make contributions for each of their employees, making available same percentage (or even more) as the worker, into the worker’s Retirement Savings Account. But so far, only 6.9% of the total labour force in Nigeria has enlisted to the scheme.

If those in the formal sector have not bothered about saving for their old age needs, then imagine what it is like in the informal sector, which constitutes 70% of Nigeria’s working population. Who is having a conversation about the bus driver’s needs, the barber, the vulcanizer, the mechanic, the electrician, the hairdresser, the tailor, and vast majority of players in the informal sector who have zilch knowledge of the contributory pension scheme?

But it’s not entirely a hopeless situation. If you are in the formal sector, and you haven’t started making contributions towards your old age, then you should start today, now. Look for Pension Funds Administrators in Nigeria (actually, just a bit of a google search will give you the answer) and inform the HR and Accounts units of your organisation that you want them to start making monthly contributions to your Pension Savings Account. That also means the company (your employer) will start making their own contributions (which should be 10% of your salary, but not deducted from your salary. It’s simply an amount from your employer that is worth ten percent of your salary.)

Right now, only 26 out of the 36 states have adopted the Pension Scheme and are at various stages of implementation. And even in the states that adopted it, there are doubts that many of them still remit the contributions given Nigeria’s current economic quagmire. One would have expected the trade unions and the Nigerian Labour Congress to raise such questions and do well to put the erring state governments on their toes.

For those in the informal sector, PenCom has some good news. By the way, PenCom is National Pension Commission, the body that regulates pension operations in Nigeria. The regulatory body has concluded plans to roll out what it calls Micro Pensions, a long-term financial plan for the provision of pension coverage to organisations with less than 3 employees (the current pension law captured only organisations with 3 employees and above) as well as players in the informal sector. The features of the Micro Pension scheme include flexibility in contributions, such that the typical player can conveniently save for his old age. The micro pension scheme will also make it easy for participants to make withdrawals even before retirement age.

impressive, but we need pension to be more safe.