Don tasks National Assembly on whistle-blowers, pension laws

A  professor from the Faculty of Law, University of Jos, Joash Amupitan, has appealed to the National Assembly to pass the whistle-blowers law to ensure transparency and good governance at all levels.

Professor Amupitan, who made the appeal while delivering the 81st inaugural lecture series of the university with the theme, “Nigerian Corporate Governance: from concentrated ownership to dispersed ownership. Which way forward?,” said the National Assembly needed to hasten action on this as part of their contribution to the anti-corruption crusade.

“The National Assembly should, as a matter of urgency pass into law, the protected disclosure and whistleblowers bill 2016, to further enhance accountability and transparency in both the public and private sectors.”

He lamented that pensioners in Nigeria were being short changed, pointing out that huge sums in various pension funds were not been utilised effectively for the development of the country.

“Pension funds now run into trillions of naira in Nigeria and it remained unutilised and un-invested thereby opening it up for misappropriation. The worst of it is that pensioners are short changed by administrators.”

Professor Amupitan called for the reform of the pension administration in Nigeria saying, “it is against the above background that we advocate the reform of the pension scheme by building pension administrators into strong institutional investors since they have the powers to invest and manage pension fund and assets under section 55(b) and 85 of the pension reform act.” The university teachers said Nigeria was currently in recession due to mismanagement of national resources by those in the helm of affairs.

The Plateau State deputy governor, Professor Soni Tyoden, who was a former Vice Chancellor of the university, said the topic of the lecture was timely, considering current challenges in the Nigerian economy and congratulated the university for keeping faith with the traditions of inaugural lectures.

Earlier, Vice Chancellor of the University of Jos, Professor Sebastian Maimako, in a welcome address, said the lecture would help address issues bordering on corporate governance.

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