‘Board needs change’
THE Fiji National Provident Fund (FNPF) board needs to be responsive to gender issues and an investigation into the $300 million lost by FNPF members when contributions were reduced must be looked into, claims Professor Wadan Narsey.
He made the claims while speaking virtually from Australia during the launch of the Fiji Women’s Rights Movement (FWRM) research report Beyond 33 per cent: The Economic Empowerment of Fiji Women and Girls recently.
Mr Narsey said FNPF received and recorded contributors every month and therefore has an incredible time series database for all FNPF contributors going back to their first contribution.
He said each contributor could be characterised by employment status, annual contribution, annual income, total contribution by variables such as gender, ethnicity, age, industry, occupation and location.
“FNPF and all public stakeholders can therefore have an up-todate snapshot of monthly and annual changes in all these variables as they occurred,” he said.
“The Australian Bureau of Statistics does a lot with these kinds of things, but you know in Fiji this has been stopped.
“FNPF can do a lot and in fact what FNPF can do on a monthly basis, the Bureau of Statistics is able to do on a five yearly basis when they run their annual data.
“This database can be extremely useful for Government and policy makers and, of course, the general stakeholders.”
He said FNPF had over 350,000 members, with over two-thirds being active contributors, and was a treasure trove of data for the public and private sectors.
“I have written in the last two years about the $300 million that workers lost because the FNPF contribution was reduced.
“I did not hear any protest from the chairman of FNPF that the financial interests of contributors were being harmed.
“If you lost $300 million over the last two years from FNPF, you multiply that compound interest by 1.5 per cent per year. In 20 years’ time, the $300 million would have amount to more than $1 billion.”
He said the Government must appoint a board that cared about the workers and society and the database had to be analysed.
“If you go back and look at the FNPF reports of the 1970s and ‘80s, they had all kinds of incredible information on incomes of the contributors when Lionel Yee was the CEO.
“And over time in the last 10 or 20 years, these reports have been more glossy, full of pages or photos and things of no real information at all.
“The latest FNPF annual report is no different from the last four or five years.”