President Yoweri Museveni has directed the National Social Security Fund (NSSF) to stop paying Uganda Retirement Benefits Regulatory Authority (URBRA) off savers’ funds.
“I met a select committee to discuss the NSSF Bill. We talked about midterm access and the role of the Uganda Retirement Benefits Regulatory Authority (URBRA). I noted that URBRA is being wrongly paid off workers’ savings and this should stop immediately,” Museveni said.
URBRA is a government-owned, semi-autonomous agency responsible for regulating, licensing, supervising, and controlling the retirement sector in Uganda, the third-largest economy in the East African Community. The authority is also responsible for issuing guidelines to allow the liberalization of the retirement sector in the country.
The Agency was charging NSSF Shs7 billion annually however, Museveni directed it to stop and instead said they should restructure and be paid by the government. “This is not negotiable, URBRA should not be paid by workers, it is supposed to be paid by the Government. When you create an agency, you should cater for it,” he said.
URBRA was established by an Act of Parliament of Uganda in 2011. The agency is under the Uganda Ministry of Finance and Economic Development but is semi-autonomous, with a governing board and a management team led by an executive director as the chief executive officer.
Before 2012, there were only two major retirement benefits plans in the country: the Public Employees Retirement Plan, for some civil servants, and the National Social Security Fund (Uganda), for privately employed people whose employers had at least five employees on payroll.
