Pension firms should invest in goats

NSSF building in Nairobi. Photo/FILE  Nation Media Group

Ted Malanda

When I quit my previous job, my employer refused to part with his contribution of Sh390,000 towards my pension saying I had to wait till I became 55, wrinkled and frail before he paid me.

One and a half years ago, I asked him to transfer that withheld pension to my new boss. "I want to consolidate my savings in one basket," I lied. Truth is I was moving my money because I don’t trust government pension schemes.

To my great surprise, they sent a cheque for Sh430,000 last week. In other words, my pension had not been ‘eaten’ as I had feared. It has actually been laying eggs and in three years, it has made me Sh40,000 richer.

Yet when I resigned in 2005, a quarter an acre of land in the neighbourhood of Ongata Rongai was going for half a million bob, payable in beer rounds and small cash instalments. Today, the same piece goes for Sh1.2 million, hard cash.

Thus, anyone who bought land is getting rich without lifting a finger while I and millions of other idiots whose savings are locked up in fancy pension schemes are only paying investment bankers and getting poorer.

In fact, when we retire, that pension won’t even be worth a skinny he-goat.

When my father retired in 1977, I was in Standard Two. His pension was 700 bob a month. Last year, it had appreciated to Sh2,000 — the equivalent of an average beer bill for the evening.

To be honest, I still get shocked that the old man, aided by his cute wife who happened to be my mother, squeezed us through school. Don’t forget that unlike these days when we have one spoilt brat, my parents practically raised a football team. Of course, they didn’t achieve this feat on the old man’s Sh700-a-month pension.

foresight

Being a man of foresight, he had invested in two zebu heifers in 1959. The magic about zebus, what colonial farmers derisively called shenzi (stupid) cattle, is that they can literally survive through hell.

Unlike pampered hybrid cattle, zebus don’t need veterinary doctors, artificial insemination, mineral water and luxurious foods like Napier grass and biscuits. They are tough. They practically live on sisal and boiled rags.

By the time the old man was fired in 1977, his two heifers had multiplied to 85, including Jomo, a champion bull that sired calves left, right and centre and held the village bullfight champion award for a record four years.

It is those zebus that took my siblings and I through school. Every beginning of term, he would sell a cow or two and shoe us — three pupils at any given time — off to school, while Jomo did his thing. Now contrast that with yours truly, my father’s allegedly "educated and widely travelled" son.
leaky affairs

I own neither land nor livestock. My puny savings are instead locked up in fancy unit trusts, risky insurance schemes, questionable stocks, leaky pension schemes and a second-hand car that guzzles fuel like a witch and depreciates in value each day.

While my father wakes every morning to his mooing assets and the comforting aroma of fresh cow dung, I could wake up to news that some crooked investment broker has tinkered with my stocks and rendered me destitute.

My father knew. Jomo could always sire another calf. But a task force won’t bring back money that a government pension fund took from me by force and gleefully flushed down the urinal.