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Imperatives of Social Security Laws to Social Development in Nigeria

Document Cited authorities 4 Cited in Related
Vincent
DOI10.3366/ajicl.2020.0312
Published date01 May 2020
Pages244-266
Date01 May 2020
INTRODUCTION

Social security and social development are interrelated and interdependent concepts that are pivotal to the promotion of the welfare of the citizenry. Social security is usually a policy1 of government aimed at providing a safety net against the social and economic risks of life. The relevance of social security to social stability, a prerequisite to social development, has for long been given recognition, since the early 1880s when Germany, through its Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, adopted legislation to introduce social insurance programmes, which provided workers with assistance for job-related injuries, sickness and invalidity and an old age pension, as a strategy to stave off socialism and to protect the wage earners from the social and economic risks of life.2 The concept later became influential outside Germany, as a major component of the welfare state, through the early post-war social reforms in the United Kingdom as it was generally adopted as a key feature of advanced capitalist democracies and as the political solution to societal contradictions.3

In its classical exposition, social security embraces all governmental programmes which have been designed to improve the living conditions of the citizenry, with special attention devoted to the continual improvement of the living standards of the underprivileged. It has been defined as:

… the social protection, organized collective protection, of the individual against want, poverty, destitution, disease and idleness, which may be thrust upon him by the varied hazards and vicissitudes of social life, notably loss or suspension of income or means of sustenance resulting from sickness, maternity, accident, injury, invalidity, old age, death of breadwinner or unemployment.4

Generally, the concept of social security is predicated upon the vision of a fairer arrangement of society. It is built around the concept of social justice, which principle requires that everyone should have an equal right to the satisfaction of, at least, the basic needs. The importance of social security to social development lies in its uniformly competitive set of objectives which cut across national frontiers and barriers. These include the guarantee of income security, access to medical care and relief from poverty, want and destitution. It is also used as a mechanism for income re-distribution, social solidarity and social cohesion.5

Similarly, social development encompasses all activities of government, including social, political, economic, healthcare, environmental and technological issues, which have direct impact on both the natural and human resources of a country and are geared towards improving the standard and quality of life of the citizenry. It generally refers to the formal and informal machinery through which development is enhanced in society.6 The formal aspect includes laws, regulations and rules created by states and other entities, while the informal entails behavioural norms, attitudes, beliefs and rules of thumb.7 The focus of this article is on the formal aspect with special attention to social security laws. There is no gainsaying the fact that, through the instrumentality of law, it has been made possible for the state to recognise the yearnings of the citizenry, particularly the underprivileged, and also give them a forum in which these yearnings can achieve official consideration and approval without involving any particular action which might affect the existing pyramid of power.8 Also, social theory has never ignored the functional and normative role of law as an instrument of social engineering, that is of bringing about progressive change or control in any society and of serving the needs of human society.9 Law is, therefore, central to social development as it engineers the society towards a better way of doing things. It is the means to make certain that people do not merely live, but live well and become as virtuous as is possible. Without law to order and govern human relations, there would be anarchy, which is an antithesis of development.

Social security is a social concept of numerous parts and sub-parts. The Social Security (Minimum Standards) Convention 195210 of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) provides for minimum standards in nine distinct branches of social security, namely: medical care, sickness, unemployment, old age, employment injury, family, maternity, invalidity and survivorship.11 The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999,12 in section 14(2)(b) thereof, provides that ‘the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government.’13 Furthermore, Nigeria is a signatory to a number of international instruments which give recognition to the right to social security. These include the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) 1966,14 the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) 198915 and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights 1981 (African Charter).16

In Nigeria, old age, invalidity and survivors’ benefits are provided for contributors to the Pension Scheme established under the Pension Reform Act 2014,17 while medical benefits are provided for contributors to the Fund established under the National Health Insurance Scheme Act 1999.18 Work injury benefits are available under the Employees’ Compensation Act 2010 to all employers and employees in the public and private sectors in the Federal Republic of Nigeria.19 There is, at present, no provision in the law for unemployment, family and non-occupational benefits. Limited provision, however, exists for sickness and maternity benefits in the Labour Act.20 It is noteworthy that these Nigerian laws on social security are all basically employment-related. The formal sector, both public and private, which these laws ordinarily cover, only represents about 20–25 per cent of the Nigerian population. A large majority of the citizenry, who are in dire need of a social safety net, are thereby excluded therefrom despite the constitutional mandate on the state to make the security and welfare of the people ‘the primary purpose of government’.

The article examines the current socio-economic milieu in Nigeria with a view to determining the extent to which the institutionalisation of a comprehensive social security scheme, through appropriate statutory enactment, could be utilised in tackling some of the challenges hindering the socio-economic development of the nation.

 IMMANENT AND RECENT SOCIAL DILEMMA IN NIGERIA

Nigeria's fledgling experiment with social security laws has not been without its own opportunity costs, which have posed enormous challenges to the social and economic development of the country.

One major consequence of the absence of an all-encompassing social security scheme in Nigeria is the deepening of the poverty level with its attendant socio-economic costs to the nation. Poverty, no doubt, is a socio-economic condition and one of the manifestations of underdevelopment. Although there is no universally accepted definition of poverty, it has been said to mean:

… a human condition characterized by sustained or chronic deprivation of the resources, capabilities, choices, security and power necessary for the enjoyment of an adequate standard of living and other civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights.21

Thus a person with insufficient income to provide a minimum standard of living suffers from poverty. In other words, poverty entails the ability to satisfy only a small proportion of one's want. In a World Bank Country Programme Portfolio Review for 2013, the country director for Nigeria, Marie Françoise Marie-Nelly disclosed that about 100 million out of the 1.2 billion people in the world that live in destitution are Nigerians.22 Nigeria's Human Development Index for 2017 was 0.532, which positioned the country in the low human development category and also occupied 157 out of 189 countries and territories considered for that year.23 Although revenues from crude oil have increased over the past decades before plummeting in 2015,24 and Nigeria has had impressive growth performance in recent years as the Income GINI coefficient rose to 48.8 per cent in 2013,25 which accounted for its being rated as the largest economy in Africa ahead of South Africa and 26th globally,26 this has not actually translated into prosperity for the people in terms of per capita income and individuals’ living standard as the majority of Nigerians have continued to fall deeper into poverty

Indeed, in South Africa, about seven out of every 100 South Africans are in receipt of government social assistance in one form or the other and such payment has played a significant role in alleviating poverty in many areas.27 Furthermore, South Africa's old age pension, which provides benefits to about 1.9 million beneficiaries, about 85 per cent of the eligible population, has reduced the poverty gap for pensioners by 94 per cent.28 Also, cross-countries studies of income redistribution that examine the coverage of low-income risks by government programmes have established that social security has helped to reduce poverty drastically by at least 40 per cent in Europe, 70 per cent in heavily insured countries such as Belgium and Sweden, and by 28 per cent in the USA.29

Undoubtedly, the cost of not tackling poverty is more devastating than the resources that would be committed to fighting the scourge. Poverty creates tension and breeds violence, revolts, social disharmony, horrors and deep-seated corruption, and has the potential of inducing the commission of heinous crimes, including murder.30 Also, the prevalence of abject poverty, deprivation and wantonness in any society constitutes injustice. It has also been rightly noted that where people are deprived of income, decent housing and a decent environment, opportunities to participate fully in the life of the country in which they live and...

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