Low retirement age, high fees against pensioners

As the World Bank convenes the 7th World Conference on Pension and Savings in Washington DC in September, pensioners around the world are facing scheming and ploys by politicians who are tinkering with the pension regimes in their various countries.

The purposes of the tinkering include shortening the number of years pensioners can enjoy the fruit of their labour. The politicians are pushing up the age of retirement for both males and females. In one country they are unthinkably thinking of raising it to 90 years. In most countries it is now 65, and 75 years in a few.

The countries doing this to senior citizens include Russia, where the Central Electoral Commission has amidst widespread protests approved requests for a referendum on upping the retirement age to 65 years for men and 63 for women by 2034, the Moscow Times reported.

In Africa, the Vice President of Zimbabwe, Constantino Chiwenga, has raised the retirement age for soldiers, from 65 to 70, with immediate effect, ZWNEWS, an online news site reported on Wednesday, quoting an announcement in a government gazette.

A new section was inserted in the country’s military service regulation giving the power to the president to allow specialist members of the Armed Forces to remain active soldiers until attaining the age of 70 years. This will create an army of senior citizens who might not live long as pensioners on retirement!!

The suggestion to delay the enjoyment of pensions by retirees was made as an economic expediency by the World Economic Forum in May 2017 thus: “The retirement age should rise to at least 70 in rich countries” because life expectancy is assumed by experts to reach above 100 in such countries.

The BBC said in a May 26, 2017 report that the recommendation was made to Canada, Japan, United States of America and the United Kingdom. They tragically heeded the suggestion.

But the recommendation ignored the fact that Japan has the largest number of officiallyacknowledged people aged 100 or more in the world. This implies that at 70 a Japanese man can continue to work.

However, even before the suggestion by the World Economic Forum, 14 “rich” countries have raised their retirement ages, amidst protests by citizens. The countries that have been raising the retirement age piecemeal to minimise public backlash, according to a report in AARP blog (an organisation for over 50s in Washington DC), are Spain, where the Prime Minister was voted out for daring to up it to 67 from 65 in 2011; Austria has raised it to 65 years for men and 60 for women; it was done in Slovakia, and is being done gradually, cleverly, in the United Kingdom and Germany. Italy, Greece and Ireland are also in the league.

It is significant to note that the countries involved are all struggling with pension crises despite the juggling and permutations to sort it out. Nigeria should not emulate those countries. Some of them are struggling to sustain economies where the workforce is almost equal to the number of pensioners, the impact of birth control.

While technically politicians adjusting are the retirement age to ensure that retirees benefit minimally as pensioners around the world, pension fund managers are greedily charging excessive management fees from the savings of pensioners.

UK’s Daily Telegraph newspaper screamed on August 7th, 2018: “British pension savers’ plans to pass on their hard-earned money to their children are being derailed by sky high charges for services they will never use.” This scenario is in the case of selfinvested personal pension (Sipp).

Here in Nigeria, how much do the pension fund administrators, custodians and PenCom charge for the services they rendered or even fail to render? Do pensioners have saviours? These posers are worthy of clarifying at the World Bank’s Conference on Pension and Savings, but preferably here at home.