By Chesa Chesa
The Minister for Labour and Employment, Dr Muhammadu Maigari Dingyadi, has commended the Managing Director/CE of the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund (NSITF), Barr. Oluwaseun Faleye, for the reforms he has instituted at the Fund.
He made the commendation when the Managing Director led the delegation of the Board of the Industrial Injuries Compensation Fund of the Social Security and Housing Finance Corporation, SSHFC of the Gambia, on a courtesy visit to the Minister on Monday.
Dr. Dingyadi expressed his delight for the visit of the Gambian delegation to Nigeria to “Interact and understudy our social insurance trust fund, ably led by Mr. Faleye, who has been doing tremendous work with the administration of the Employees’ Compensation Scheme.”.
Represented by the Permanent Secretary, Dr Kamil Shoretire, the Minister stated that “Our compensation mechanism has improved, and a lot of digitization is happening now to ensure that claims are attended to as soon as possible, while a lot of transformation that has been going on in the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund.”
On the partnership between NSITF and The Gambia’s SSHFC, the minister said “It is very important that the two countries exchange ideas on how to improve the lives of their citizens, particularly the working subsets of the population that those agencies primarily support, and also by extension, giving government the much-needed impetus to be able to attend to the needs of the large majority of the population.”
Continuing, he stressed that “Our own is an ongoing process. We have not reached where we want to be. And we also want to see what Gambia has been able to do, so that our fund too will be able to scale up the best practices you’re going to share with us.”
In his response, NSITF’s Managing Director, Barr. Oluwaseun Faleye, expressed appreciation for the minister’s warm reception, while recalling that Nigeria and the Gambia have a long history of collaboration in different areas, which underscored the ongoing partnership between the two agencies.
“This exchange of ideas and collaboration has been in the making for a long time, and that’s why when we received the request from the Gambian Social Security Institution to visit Nigeria for this engagement, we readily accepted.
“We accepted because we felt that our demographics, our background and dynamics are somewhat similar. We are, you know, even though we’re a much more larger country, but when we look at the demographics in terms of the former market population, or look at the young age groups that you’ll find in these countries, we have similarities across West Africa, indeed across Africa, and even if our institutions may differ, the issues that we deal with are similar, and we think that learning from each other will be very, very critical in dealing with the challenges that we both face in our respective countries.”
Speaking during the visit to the Minister, the leader of the Gambian delegation, Pierre Gomez, expressed satisfaction with what they have experienced so far at NSITF, noting that “This is not our first time coming to NSITF. We’ve been here NSITF and Nigeria is our big brother and that is why we are coming back to our big brother on knowledge sharing and we can share a lot of experience together.
“I’m very pleased with the transformation I’ve seen so far. I think I was here about a decade ago, and I’ve seen a lot of changes happen, so, it is imperative to come back and get that information or that knowledge from Nigeria, take it back and share with our colleagues before back home,” he stressed.
