The Group Managing Director of SA Insurance Plc, Mr. Bode Akinboye, has said that the greatest number of debtors to insurance companies were governments and their agencies.

Mr. Akinboye told Daily Sun in an interview that they were expecting the governments “to show good example, by paying for the premium of policies they hold and then look at the legal framework that made it compulsory for insurance debts to be paid.”

He advised them to particularly look at the central data base they are working on such as the national identity card and link it to a national data. He said the “card system is working well abroad, but credit card system can’t work here until we have a biometric data base system that can truly identify every individual in the country. And then, can hook that to the payment system and the entire country system.”

He said, “if government really wants people to buy insurance, let’s say, we need to break down the ability to do all these things to weekly premium payment. That cannot be possible unless we have national data system that is hooked together centrally, to the banking system, also hooked to the financial systems, if that is hooked to insurance system, stock brokerage, and other sectors.

He believes that it would be just the same, if one can link every thing together, and ”it will help for tax collection and all other things.”
Mr. Akinboye believes that “if we really desire economic growth, we must address power problem, we must address the central data base system, the biometric data base, and road transportation and then every other thing can fall in line.”

SA Insurance chief executive disclosed that his group was working to move the capital base up to more than N100 billion in the next five years, saying that “it is achievable,” adding “we will grow to become a leading insurance company in Nigeria, because, we have everything here, we have the population.”
Mr. Akinboye said the missing link is government. Government has to be the driver of insurance. That has to involve the ministry of Finance and the NAICOM. They have to really be on the street to force the insurance culture on the people.

If insurance is to evolve very well, and it is doing very well, and we are able to mobilize more savings and more funds, who benefits? The government will benefit.
The money we are losing for not taking proper insurance is massive. It is not a small amount of money. Government is also losing, because they can’t collect it.