Reverend Cassandra Bowen wants when all the consultations and town halls with the members of the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) Board are finished “I would like to see something positive going forward and a solution that is workable for everyone and above all, those documents are being thrown to the parliament”.
The documents referred to pending audits.
Rev Bowen said this cannot be a talking exercise for people just to feel like they are contributing. She made her voice and position known when the first of a series of municipalities around Barbados began work to get public input on the pre-crisis issue facing the National Insurance Fund.
Many applauded the Reverend, who is also an educator, as she called for greater education especially at all levels of schooling to avoid producing adults who are ignorant of deductions, contributions, pensions and other financial instruments and social that are crucial in their future. She confessed that she wishes she had the foresight to see the road when she was younger. She made an earnest plea for webinars, seminars and workshops to “educate, educate, educate.”
Having been brought up by her grandmother, Rev Bowen said she learned a hard lesson about pensions and the NIS very early in life. She said it was “unfair” that her grandmother was denied her pension because she took in her four grandchildren who were living in an orphanage in Trinidad. She claimed that the NIS deemed her breast unfit to continue to qualify for the pension she was receiving because she could bear the burden of her grandchildren.
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Rev Bowen came to the first town hall at Combermere School with her points listed on a piece of paper and for almost every point, she received a rousing round of applause from the crowd present. Including when she argued that someone should be fired for misusing NIS funds and a cap should be placed on government borrowing from the NIS Fund. She also agreed that contributions are down and the brain drain among young citizens is high and will continue to rise. Recently retired and receiving a “reward”, as she laughed at the amount of the pension, she also confessed that under other circumstances she would emigrate, “I want the same problem with different people”.
NIS CEO Kim Tudor told Rev Bowen that the NIS Board would like to see her notes because she made salient points and hammered home the fact that “you have to look at it broadly”.
