Abuja, July 9, 2026 – The National Pension Commission (PenCom) is to increase the number of enrollees under its health insurance scheme to 30,000 pensioners.
Omolola Oloworaran, its Director-General, disclosed this while speaking at a meeting of the Pension Industry Leadership Council (PILC) in Abuja.
She said the scheme currently has 13,000 enrollees which is not encouraging.
Oloworaran said the insurance scheme is now targeting 30, 000 enrollees for a smooth takeoff of the pilot stage.
She said to increase the participation, Pencom would have to expand the eligibility criteria from those earing N70,000 to N150,00 pension income.
“We have 13,000 people, and we need to be able to run the pilot scheme; we need to have a lot of people on board.
“We need to be able to test the system to make sure that it works well. So, in order to get more people on board, we have now increased the pension income level to 150,000.
“So, everybody that takes a pension of 150,000 and below can go and try to onboard on the Pencare initiative, and will be entitled to free up pensions.
“But I must put a caveat to it, that the reason we are doing this is that it’s a pilot stage,
“We need a lot of people on board, and I also think that some ordinary Nigerians who earn low pensions are simply not aware and we need to ensure that citizens actually have access to health insurance,” she said
Oloworaran also said PenCom was reviewing the Pension Reform Act, 2014, 12 years after its last amendment.
She said the review was intended to modernize the pension system and improve retirement benefits for millions of workers.
“The reason we are reviewing is to modernise the Act. Things continue to change, and we continue to come up with reform ideas that improve the lives of ordinary Nigerians who are part of the scheme,” she said..
