The Minister of Trade and Industry, Haruna Indrisu, has urged the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) to leverage technology to ease the stress pensioners go through to access their payments.

This, he said, will stop pensioners from travelling to SSNIT offices to renew their pensions twice a year after age 72. Currently, failure by such a pensioner to update his/her records could lead to SSNIT assuming that he/she has passed on. “You have to devise a means by which at the click of a button, the pensioner should be able to provide any needed information.

“In the same way, with the abundant use of mobile telephones, it should be possible for pensioners to be alerted whenever payments are made into their bank accounts; this will eliminate the need to travel to the bank only to be told that payments have not been effected by SSNIT,” he said.

“Pensions should not be regarded as a punishment. Proceeding on pension, having attained the compulsory age of retirement, should not be reduced to a punishment after dedicated public service.”

The Minister was speaking at the inauguration of a new board of directors for SSNIT in Accra. The board consists of Prof. Joshua Alabi as the Chairman; Col. (rtd) James Adamu Koto; Mr. Ernest Thompson, the acting Managing Director; Mr. K.D Boateng; Naaba Alhaji Mahamadu Aaibi Azongo; Mr. Alex Frimpong; Mr. Kwame Amo-Dako; Mr. Terence Ronald Darko; Kweku Ricketts-Hagan, a Deputy Minister of Finance; Mrs. Regina Atsutsey; Mr. Prince Williams Ankrah; Mr. Kofi Asamoah; and Mr. Theodore Nee Okpey.

Prof. Joshua Alabi said the board feels a grave sense of responsibility at the thought of leading this prominent national organisation at such a critical time when the country has just attained lower middle-income status.

He congratulated their predecessors for attaining new heights with the organisation, saying “our task as a new board is to add-on to the sculptured work”. As the biggest pension manager, SSNIT’s investments accounted for 5.9 percent of GDP in September 2012, a third of which is invested in equity and more than half in fixed-income products.

SSNIT is also heavily involved in the real-estate sector, where its latest project, a partnership with Mauritius-based Delico Property Development, aims to construct on the outskirts of Accra the biggest shopping mall in West Africa.