Proposals to increase retirement age and pension contribution rate   Seychelles Pension Fund starts series of education, awareness sessions  |26 November 2021

Ms Abdulmajid addressing the gathering during the session yesterday (Photo: Joena Meme)

Following the recent announcements by the minister for finance that the retirement age will increase from 63 to 65 in 2023, the Seychelles Pension Fund has embarked on a series of education and awareness sessions to educate different groups of stakeholders on the importance of the two announcements.

The first session yesterday afternoon at the Ceps conference room was for a group representing various non-governmental organisations.

The session was led by the chief executive of the Seychelles Pension Fund (SPF), Nisreen Abdulmajid and Darell Bristol, the SPF’s head of corporate communication in the presence of other key officials of the SPF.

The session started off with a detailed PowerPoint presentation on the SPF, its objectives, the different contributions to the fund, its assets, its investments, the benefits it offers and everything else about the fund that the public needs to know.

The main questions now worrying the majority of our people is why the need to increase our contribution as well as the retirement age at a time when the cost of living is continuously rising and there are no salary increase and people are struggling to make ends meet.

“We need to act now to ensure the sustainability of the SPF because what we are collecting is less than what we are paying to members annually,” Ms Abdulmajid said.

She noted that the current economic challenges are not helping the SPF but instead depleting it.

To show how the SPF’s revenue collected through its own investments have declined over the years, Ms Abdulmajid noted that for instance in 2018 the fund’s annual revenue collected through its various investments were 9%, in 2019 7%, and in 2020 only 6%.

She further explained why is it important to increase the rate of employee contributions to make the SPF sustainable in the coming years as per the recommendations of the fund’s international actuaries.

Following the presentation questions from the floor included the need to have a stronger drive to ensure more people of working age take a permanent employment so they too can contribute their share in the SPF.

There was also a call for the SPF to start a campaign to capture individuals working in the informal sector to ensure there is a compulsory contribution from them as well.

As more and more foreigners are coming in to work in the hospitality and construction sector and they are not contributing to the SPF, there was a call for the SPF to make a proposal to government to make their employers pay a compulsory contribution to the SPF which in a way would encourage them to employ more Seychellois instead of foreigners.

In view of the reaction from the floor it was clear that there is strong resistance to the two announcements. 

Marie-Anne Lepathy