Federal Government’s dream of ramping up pension assets for investments into infrastructure development seems floundering as most recent report shows a stagnation in funds allocation to the sector.

Meanwhile the bulk of the over N12trillion assets are going into Federal Government Bond borrowing instrument which are used for government recurrent expenditure.

At the backdrop of the quest to address the huge infrastructure gap in the country, the pension policy had envisaged about 15 percent of the total pension asset would be deployed to the sector, but latest update on the deployment of the pension assets by the National Pension Commission, PenCom, has indicated that infrastructure share of the allocation has stagnated far below one percent.

This is compares poorly to the average of 68 percent of the assets deployed to Federal Government borrowings in form of FGN Bonds.

In Q1’21, when total pension assets recorded N12.34 trillion, according to the PenCom report, a whopping N8.5 trillion of the assets representing 68.93 per cent was invested in the FGN borrowing instrument, while the assets’ investment in the infrastructure was N66.88 billion, about 0.54 per cent of the total assets.

Further information in the report shows a similar structure in 2020. Total pension fund assets in Q1’20 stood at N10.3 trillion with about N7.02 trillion invested in FGN securities which represents 67.96 per cent of total pension assets, while N46.98 billion was invested in infrastructure, representing 0.45 per cent of pension assets.

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