There is something profoundly troubling – indeed heartbreaking – about watching the National Insurance Scheme report what appears to be a dramatic financial turnaround while, at the same time, the attitude of both the Government and the Scheme towards pensioners appears to be hardening.
For years the NIS was regarded as financially fragile. Successive actuarial reviews warned about deficits and long-term sustainability. The national conversation about the Scheme was dominated by concern about whether it could meet its obligations in the future.
Today that picture is beginning to change.
Employment has expanded, contributions have increased, and the structure of the economy itself has altered significantly. The emergence of the oil and gas sector has introduced into the system a group of relatively young, highly paid contributors, many of whom earn well above the insurable earnings ceiling. Many of these workers may spend only limited periods in insurable employment in Guyana before moving elsewhere in the international labour market. They are replaced by equally highly paid workers.
It is the kind of situation of which most fund managers can only dream. From the perspective of the Scheme’s finances, this is a financial windfall from above. Contributions increase while both short and long-term benefit obligations associated with many of those contributors will never materialise. The results are already visible. The Scheme has begun reporting improved financial outcomes, including a return to surpluses after years of concern about deficits. Losses of hundreds of millions are now converted into billions in annual surpluses.
Yet, as the financial fortunes of the Scheme improve, the treatment of pensioners appears to be moving in the opposite direction. Whether it is inertia or bad will actual and potential pensioners lose out. The Government adjusts the minimum pension only reluctantly and belatedly. The first full year of oil production saw the minimum pension increased from $32,100 to $35,000 per month. It remained there for four years after which it moved to $43,075 per month.
Meanwhile, cost of living moved up, and up and up.
The harshness directed at the thousands were tragically directed at those who sought to stand up for their rights. Here are three cases of which I am painfully aware.
The first concerns the carpenter whose employer deducted National Insurance contributions from his wages but failed to remit them fully to the Scheme. When he applied for his pension, the claim was refused. He successfully challenged the decision and took the matter to court, but his victory proved short lived. One might reasonably have expected the matter to end there. It was the only time ever that the NIS appealed such a decision. The word is that the Government compelled the NIS to appeal the case and to ask that the decision be stayed. No money for Borther Zainul. He is still waiting, even as his health deteriorates. The Government’s excuse: that allowing the claim might create a precedent and “open the floodgates.”
The second case reflects a different but equally painful reality. A pensioner who believed that she had satisfied the statutory requirement of 750 contributions was informed that she was short by four contributions.
Four contributions out of seven hundred and fifty.
After months of struggle, she eventually instructed that the case be withdrawn. In explaining her decision, she wrote that she was not withdrawing the claim because she believed she was wrong. She was doing so because the process had exhausted her. The delays, the resistance and the strain of the struggle had taken a serious toll on her health and peace of mind. At her stage of life, she simply no longer had the strength to continue fighting the system.
The third case may be the most tragic of all. An appeal concerning pension entitlement was filed in 2010. It was not heard until 2023 – Thirteen years later. The delay was not attributable to the claimant. When the Appeal Tribunal eventually ruled in his favour, one might have expected the long ordeal finally to end.
Instead, the implementation of the decision itself has been delayed. Today the claimant still waits for the benefits which the Tribunal determined he is entitled to receive.
In the meantime, he has been diagnosed with cancer. He is in his late eighties. Now he wonders if his surviving nephew who cares for him will be able to continue his claim!
These are not merely administrative cases. They are human stories. Three pensioners. One who won in court but still cannot obtain his pension. One who abandoned her claim because the struggle became unbearable. And the last one who waited thirteen years for justice and now waits again while battling a life-threatening illness.
These cases raise an uncomfortable truth. It is easier in this country to obtain a tax refund than to prevail against the callous National Insurance Scheme administration. But the Government is no better – and probably worse. My messages and email to President Ali are ignored. That it seems is because they care.
The National Insurance Scheme was created as a social insurance institution. Its purpose was to provide security in old age to workers who had contributed during their productive years. It was never intended to become an adversarial institution engaged in prolonged struggles with pensioners.
These examples are about cruelty and callousness. In a country newly enriched by oil, it is especially difficult to justify.