ZIMBABWE:Pensioners urged to embrace mobile money

BY CLAYTON MASEKESA

NATIONAL Social Security Authority (NSSA)’s acting regional manager for Manicaland province, Arcadia Kecho, has called on pensioners to register with mobile cash providers so they could receive their monthly pensions electronically instead of spending long hours queuing in banking halls.

Addressing a NSSA informal sector all-stakeholders engagement meeting in Mutare on Friday, Kecho said: “We have an option where we transfer the monies on their mobile phones. We have agents everywhere through the mobile money initiative. We now appeal to the pensioners to embrace the mobile money transfers. They can do transactions via their mobile phones. We now need to educate them on this new development.”

This came after stakeholders accused NSSA of neglecting pensioners and making them travel long distances and standing in long queues at banks to access their monthly benefits.

Speaking at the same event, Manicaland Provincial Affairs minister Mandiitawepi Chimene called on NSSA to partner local authorities and informal traders in developing shopping malls to increase its revenue base.

“I want to challenge NSSA to assist the informal traders in their businesses to build market stalls or even malls so that the informal traders must sell their various wares. That is what we expect from you NSSA as social security,” she said.

Chimene said the informal sector was an important economic driver, hence her decision to rope in informal traders on her upcoming trip to China.

“I am not a person of theories or blueprints, but I am a person of action. There is no need for us to continue to talk and talk without doing any action. As a leader of the Zimbabwe-China Friendship Association, I want representatives of the informal sector to accompany me to China for some exchange visits,” she said.

“As the informal sector, you should utilise the $2 million loan facility for the small to medium enterprises. I want you to wake up and come up with good income-generating schemes. I don’t want people to misuse this fund. I will strictly monitor that money because it was given to me as the Minister of State for Manicaland province. I know people will say that I smoke mbanje, but if that mbanje makes me produce good results for the development of my people in my province, then let it be.”

SOURCE:NEWSDAY