Contributions remain positive: Nasfund

NATIONAL Superannuation Fund (Nasfund) chief executive officer Ian Tarutia says the fund’s member contributions have remained positive this financial year despite Covid-19.
Giving an update of Nasfund’s performance yesterday, Tarutia said: “Whilst the contributions is dropping, it’s still at a positive level.
“These are all the contributions that have been paid through employers.
“We were anticipating contributions to drop quite drastically and outflows to actually increase but that has not been the case.
“Contributions continue to remain at a static level averaging around K47 million a month as at the end of September.
“It was K428 million so that is still a good positive in what we call a delta of a K104 million.
“Whilst withdrawals are increasing, it’s still in a manageable amount but we anticipate that by December, and certainly in January, if this unemployment trend continues and there’s no pick up in the labour market, than we can anticipate a more significant spike on the bases that our members will be applying for Christmas and school fee funds.”
Tarutia said the fund was seeing a small incremental growth of members coming through.
“So while some parts are impacted, there are other parts of the economy that is still picking up new employees or they may already be in there but they are now coming and registering with us,” he said.
“We have 7,124 new members being registered as of late and our target is to get about 50,000 this year.”
Tarutia said a non-Covid-19 related issue that impacted the economy was the closure of the Porgera mine with the fund estimating it had paid out around K5 million to mine staff that were released.