Vice president Dr Mohamed Bilal made the revellation yesterday at the opening of the Public Service Pension Fund annual stakeholders meeting in Dar es Salaam.

 

“The government recognises the importance of paying statutory payments on time in order to help the social scheme to fulfill its responsibilities to members and support other development projects,” Bilal said.

 

He also told the PSPF management that the government will ensure that it pays all member’s’ contributions who were employed before the establishment of the Fund in July 1999.

 

“I have heard of your challenge on contribution of public servants who started work before the PSPF was set up…Since the government has accepted to pay the servants’ contributions we should cooperate to implement this,” he said.

 

Dr Bilal also reminded the employers’ representatives to submit contribution made their employees and documents on time so as to enable the fund to pay pension and that it gets earning from investment.

 

Dr Bilal further commended PSPF for coming up with a supplementary scheme to attract more members.

 

He said according to the national census, Tanzania’s population has reached 45 million and of which effective labour force is 22 million and out of it employed persons are 1.2, the remaining are in the informal sector.

 

“It is government’s intention to ensure that social security schemes expand their wings and include this big number of Tanzanians who are not contributing to any of the social security schemes,” he said.

 

He called upon the Ministry of Finance to ensure that efforts by the PSPF focus on implementing the social security policy.

 

PSPF Acting Director General Adam Mayingu, for his part, said that the supplementary scheme will attract members from both private and public sectors.

 

He said the aim is to enable many Tanzanians including those from private sector to join social security schemes.

 

Mayingu said that until June 2012 PSPF had collected 1.84trn/- and it paid 1.3trn/- as pension benefits to its members since the fund was set up.