The National Pension Commission (PenCom) has reported that Nigeria’s pension assets’ net value increased to N19.531 trillion as of the end of January this year, representing 6.40% growth when compared to the N18.356 trillion net assets value reported as of December 31st 2023.
The January 2024 pension net asset value implied that on a year-on-year basis, the assets surged by 30.87% or N4.6 trillion from N14.9 trillion assets value recorded in December 2022
The commission gave these figures in its Monthly Report for January 2024, which indicated that investment in FGN securities continued to dominate portfolio allocation with about N12.13 trillion or 62.15% of total net asset value (NAV).
In addition, the data reflected that Pension Funds also allocated N2.169 trillion to Corporate Debt Securities and N1.711 trillion to Money Market Instruments while investments in ordinary shares of local companies grew by 22.92% to N1.931 trillion in the month under review from N1.571 trillion value recorded as of the end of December 2023.
A further analysis of the commission’s report showed that Fund II, which is the default RSA Fund under the Multi-Fund Structure, accounted for the largest share of the Active RSA Funds allocation with N8.155 trillion or 42% of the total fund NAV even as Fund III also rose by 2.27% from N4.942 trillion to N5.054 trillion maintaining its second position for fund allocation.
According to the report, RSA membership for January 2024 rose 10,223,672 at the end of January this year, representing 0.32% increase when compared with the 10, 191,400 enrollees in December 2023.
It would be recalled that between 2021 and 2022, pension fund assets grew by just N1.57 trillion from N13.42 trillion to N14.99 trillion
Analysts link the rising value of the pension assets to a combination of factors, particularly the rising pension fund contributions and a rise in portfolio values.
