For years, journalists across Nigeria, particularly in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), have watched pension contributions disappear from their pay slips without ever landing in a Retirement Savings Account (RSA). The money is deducted. It is simply never remitted. And as the arrears pile up into the hundreds of millions of naira, the people whose job is to hold power to account are left asking who will hold their own employers to account.
The frustration is deeply personal for many reporters. One journalist, who has worked at a well-known Abuja newspaper for more than ten years, described watching pension sums vanish from his salary with no corresponding Retirement Savings Account ever opened in his name. He is not alone. Another journalist said her appointment letter promised a pension, yet, five years into the job, no RSA materialised for her either.
For workers who described their profession as hazardous, covering conflict, corruption, and public unrest, often while enduring harassment both online and offline, the absence of a retirement safety net compounds an already precarious existence. It means that after decades spent crossing their “T’s and dotting their I’s,” as one union leader put it, many journalists have nothing to retire on.
WHY THE CONTRIBUTORY PENSION SCHEME MATTERS
Nigeria’s Contributory Pension Scheme (CPS) was designed to prevent exactly this kind of hardship. Under the scheme, employees contribute 8% of their monthly salary while employers add 10%, building a fund meant to provide financial security in retirement.
Beyond individual security, the scheme was built to encourage long-term financial planning, offer portability between Pension Fund Administrators (PFAs), ease pressure on government resources, and channel long-term savings into national economic development.
Pension funds invested across government securities, equities, and infrastructure, have become one of the largest pools of institutional capital in the country, a pool that depends entirely on employers actually remitting what they deduct.
PENCOM RECKONING WITH THE MEDIA INDUSTRY
The scale of the problem in the media sector came into sharp focus when the Director General of the PenCom, Ms. Omolola Oloworaran, disclosed that newspaper owners owe journalists more than N720 million in unremitted pension contributions.
Speaking during a courtesy visit to Newspapers Proprietors’ Association of Nigeria (NPAN) President, Kabiru Yusuf in Abuja, Oloworaran called the findings very troubling and pressed for closer collaboration between the PenCom and media proprietors.
She reminded the sector that Pension Reform Act (PRA) 2014 requires employers to remit contributions within seven days of paying salaries, an obligation PenCom’s investigations show has been widely ignored.
Notably, PenCom singled out Daily Trust as an exception, commending the paper for consistently meeting its pension obligations since 2015, evidence, regulators suggest, that compliance is achievable even within a struggling industry.
For his part, Yusuf did not dispute the findings but appealed for understanding of the media’s financial distress, noting that many newspapers are snuggling simply to pay salaries, let alone statutory pension contributions.
He proposed a broader dialogue through the Nigerian Press Organisation (NPO), bringing together NPAN, the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE), and the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), potentially at an expanded stakeholders’ in Lagos. Oloworaran welcomed the idea, framing PenCom’s approach as collaborative rather than punitive, at least for now.
The irony is that Nigeria’s pension industry, taken as a whole, is widely regarded as one of the country’s clearest financial reform success stories. Before the Pension Reform Act of 2004 the sector was underdeveloped and burdened by unpaid liabilities. Since then, total pension assets have grown to approximately N29.5 trillion as of March 2026, with RSAs now exceeding 11 million nationwide.
That growth has been driven by stronger regulatory oversight, professional fund management, rising public confidence in the CPS over the old Defined Benefit Scheme (DBS). Yet, the media sector’s compliance gap shows that even a maturing, well-regulated pension scheme can leave entire industries behind when enforcement lags.
NUJ FCT CALLS FOR STATE OF EMERGENCY ON THE ISSUE
For the NUJ FCT Council, the issue is not merely administrative but a matter of dignity and justice. Council Chairman, Comrade Grace Ike did not mince words, describing the situation as “pathetic and unfortunate” and calling on the union’s National Secretariat and National President to intervene directly.
Ike drew a pointed comparison to how pension mismanagement in the public sector was once treated as a prosecutable offence, arguing that journalists, who are frontline workers in the quest for truth, justice and national development, deserve the same level of seriousness.
She called for “a state of emergency on non-remittance pensions for the media houses,” urging that defaulting employers be brought to book as a deterrent to others.
Ike also pointed to the remuneration bill currently before the NUJ’s National Secretariat, which she believes could help ease the broader economic pressures journalists face. She is pushing for a nationwide survey of media houses to determine the true extent of non-compliance, so that the union can present state-by-state evidence rather than anecdote.
THE ROAD AHEAD
What emerges from these accounts is a sector caught between two realities: a regulator preferring dialogue over sanctions, and a workforce that has waited years, in some cases over a decade, for contributions already deducted from their pay.
PenCom’s proposed engagement through the NPO, and the NUJ’s push for a nationwide compliance survey, may offer a path forward. But for journalists who have spent years without a functioning RSA, the question posed at the outset remains unanswered: until remittances actually reach their accounts, who exactly is looking out for them?
