Families of fallen officers should be adequately taken care of, writes REGINA UGBYIGBO ALACHI
There is a principle in insurance that is so elementary it should not need restating: no premium, no cover. When an employer fails to pay the premium due to an insurance company, the insurer has no obligation to honour claims. This is the foundational logic upon which the entire insurance industry rests. And it is precisely this logic that has been routinely violated by the Federal Government in its treatment of the men and women who defend this country. The government has, for years, failed to pay insurance premiums for military and police personnel as and when due. The consequence is that when soldiers and police officers fall in the line of duty, their families are left stranded because there is no valid policy against which to make a claim. The government, in effect, sends these men and women to die without ensuring that the most basic financial protection is in place for those they leave behind.
Let me lay out the facts. Section 4(5) of the Pension Reform Act 2014 is explicit: every employer shall maintain a Group Life Insurance Policy in favour of each employee for a minimum of three times the annual total emolument, and the premium shall be paid not later than the date of commencement of the cover. The Federal Government is the employer of every soldier, every sailor, every airman, and every police officer in Nigeria. The Defence Headquarters supervises the Group Life Assurance for the military. The Ministry of Police Affairs does the same for the police. Both are bound by law to ensure that premiums are paid on time. Both have failed spectacularly.
The evidence is damning. When the former Inspector General of Police, Kayode Egbetokun, assumed office in 2023, he inherited what he himself described as an alarming 13-year backlog of unsettled insurance claims, stretching from 2010 to 2023. Thirteen years. Let that settle. For over a decade, families of police officers who died defending this country were left in financial distress because the government had not paid the premiums that would have activated their insurance cover. Egbetokun’s predecessor, Usman Alkali Baba, was equally candid. He disclosed that due to paucity of funds, the federal government could not fund the Group Life Assurance and Group Personal Accident Insurance schemes successfully, creating gaps that led to a backlog of unpaid claims from 2012 to 2020. In other words, the government knew it was legally required to pay these premiums and simply did not do so, leaving over 6,000 families of fallen officers without cover for years.
Think about what this means in human terms. A police officer is killed during an operation against bandits in Zamfara. His widow, perhaps with three or four children, travels to the state command or to Abuja to process the insurance claim. She is told there is nothing to pay because the premium for the policy year in which her husband died was never remitted by the government. She goes home empty-handed. She returns months later. Same answer. She borrows money for transport, sells belongings, and keeps coming back. Years pass. Her children drop out of school. She depends on the charity of relatives and neighbours. And somewhere in Abuja, the budget for the policy year in question was either never released, diverted, or simply buried in bureaucratic inertia. This is not a hypothetical scenario. It is the lived experience of thousands of Nigerian families.
The military tells the same story in different colours. A 2024 study published in the journal Armed Forces & Society, based on interviews with widows of soldiers killed in the Boko Haram conflict, found that the difficulties of accessing the Group Life Insurance payout were compounded by what the researchers described as the problem between the Nigerian Army and the Insurance Company, a polite academic way of saying that the Army had not paid the premiums. Media reports corroborated this, highlighting unpaid insurance claims and the non-payment of premiums by the military authorities. The Nigerian Army Welfare Insurance Scheme (NAWIS), which has operated since 1988, funds itself partly through monthly deductions from soldiers’ salaries. But even that scheme has been plagued by opacity, delayed payouts, and the persistent question of whether the institutional premiums are being remitted to the underwriters as required.
Now here is where the matter becomes not just scandalous but unconscionable. The 2026 defence budget allocates N2.392 trillion for personnel costs, salaries, allowances, and the bureaucratic apparatus that sustains the military establishment. The Nigerian Army alone receives N1.504 trillion. The Police Force has seen its federal allocation rise from N800 billion in 2023 to approximately N1.3 trillion in the proposed 2026 budget. Yet within these enormous sums, the government cannot find the discipline to pay the insurance premiums that would protect the families of those who die in service? The premiums for Group Life Assurance for the entire Nigeria Police Force were approved at N13.3 billion by the Federal Executive Council in December 2022, a fraction of the total police budget. But as subsequent events showed, even that approval did not translate into timely payment.
To appreciate the absurdity of this situation, consider what the Pension Reform Act actually says. Section 99(1) provides that any person who contravenes the provisions of the Act commits an offence and shall be liable on conviction to a fine of not less than N250,000 or imprisonment of not less than one year, or both. The Act further provides that where the employer fails, refuses, or omits to pay the premium as and when due, the employer shall make arrangement to effect the payment of claims arising from the death of any staff during such period. In private sector employment, the National Pension Commission, PenCom, actively monitors compliance and sanctions defaulters. But when the defaulter is the Federal Government itself, who enforces compliance? Nobody. The government breaks its own law with impunity, and the families of fallen heroes bear the cost.
When the new Inspector General of Police, Tunji Disu, presented cheques worth N2.43 billion to 1,075 families of fallen officers in March this year, it was rightly applauded. But examine the details: the disbursement covered policy years stretching back to 2018/2019. The Force Insurance Officer, ACP Lydia Ameh, acknowledged that decisive measures had been taken to compel compliance from insurance providers. Compel compliance as though the insurers were the villains. In truth, an insurance company that has not received premiums has no legal or moral obligation to pay claims. The villain in this story is the employer, the Federal Government that collected budgetary allocations, sat on the premiums, and left insurers without the funds to honour policies. The fact that Egbetokun’s administration had to disburse a cumulative N24.2 billion to 9,735 families across 11 phases tells you the scale of the prior default. Nearly ten thousand families had been waiting, some for over a decade.
On the military side, the picture is no brighter. The Nigerian Army Personnel Insurance Scheme (NAPIS), was launched in 2023 in partnership with NEM Insurance under the current Chief of Army Staff, Lt. Gen. Waidi Shu’aibu. The Director-General of the Nigerian Army Finance Corporation, Maj. Gen. Julius Osifo, explained at a recent sensitisation exercise that the scheme provides coverage for disability, death in service, and hospitalisation. He noted that in the event a soldier pays the supreme sacrifice, the Army ensures that salary and allowances continue to be paid to the next of kin for two years. These are improvements. But the question that must be asked is this: are the premiums being paid on time? Is the cover actually in force for every soldier deployed to Sambisa, to Zamfara, to Kaduna, to the South-East? The history of default gives no confidence that the answer is yes.
Let us be clear about what is at stake. A soldier or police officer who goes into battle without valid insurance cover is, from a financial perspective, going naked. If he dies, his family enters a bureaucratic labyrinth. If he is permanently disabled, the system offers him little certainty. If he suffers psychological trauma, and the incidence of post-traumatic stress among Nigerian combat veterans is grossly underreported, there is virtually no structured support. Meanwhile, his colleagues watch. They see how the families of those who fell before them are treated. They see the widows begging, children withdrawn from school, and the bureaucratic humiliation. Shortly after, the predictable consequence follows: morale collapses, some soldiers refuse deployment, others desert. Some, as Senator Ali Ndume warned, may be forced to accept bribes from the very terrorists they are meant to fight, simply to survive.
President Bola Tinubu’s decision on his 74th birthday in March to pledge all his salaries since assuming office to a newly created Armed Forces Welfare Fund was symbolically important. He directed the Accountant-General to establish a special account for injured service members and the families of fallen troops. He called on governors, lawmakers, and the private sector to contribute. The gesture was welcomed, and rightly so. But here is the uncomfortable truth: Nigeria does not need a new welfare fund. Nigeria needs the government to pay the premiums it already owes under existing law. The architecture exists. The Pension Reform Act Mandates Group Life Insurance. NAWIS exists. NAPIS exists. The police Group Life Assurance Scheme exists. The problem has never been the absence of schemes. The problem is that the government does not fund them.
It is rather like a man who refuses to pay his rent for years, allows his family to be evicted, and then announces at his birthday party that he will start a special housing fund from his pocket money. The crowd applauds. But the sensible question is: why not simply pay the rent? Why create a parallel structure to address a failure that stems from not honouring existing obligations? The N200 million the President donated at the 2026 Armed Forces Remembrance Day, the salary pledge, the ‘Thank a Soldier’ digital platform, all commendable. But they are no substitute for institutional compliance with the law. A sustainable welfare system cannot depend on the personal generosity of whoever occupies Aso Rock. It must be anchored in policy, in law, and in the ironclad guarantee that when the premium falls due, the government pays it.
The Nigerian Insurance Industry Reform Act 2025 has strengthened the regulatory framework for compulsory insurance in this country. Under NAICOM’s oversight, private sector employers face penalties for defaulting on Group Life Insurance premiums. But the Federal Government remains the largest single employer for the purpose of insurance in Nigeria, the Police Force alone has over 300,000 personnel, and yet it is the most consistent defaulter. The Police, to their credit, attempted to address this by incorporating the Nigeria Police Insurance Company, which was supposed to handle all insurance matters for the Force internally. But even that initiative, announced by the former IGP Baba in 2022, has progressed slowly, and the fundamental problem remains: whoever provides the insurance needs to be funded by the government. An insurance company, whether private or police-owned, cannot pay claims without receiving premiums.
What, then, must be done? The prescription is straightforward, even if the political will to implement it is not. First, the National Assembly must legislate a specific appropriation line for military and police Group Life Insurance premiums, ring-fenced and non-discretionary, that is released automatically at the beginning of each fiscal year. It should not require the personal intervention of a president or an IGP to release funds that are legally mandated. Second, PenCom and NAICOM must be empowered to audit and sanction public sector compliance with the Group Life Insurance provisions, including the military and police. The current arrangement where the government is both the defaulting employer and the entity that should enforce compliance is a structural absurdity. Third, the payment of claims must be decentralised and digitised. The Police Insurance Claims Management Portal launched under Egbetokun was a step in the right direction. The military should replicate and improve upon it. No widow should travel to Abuja to collect what is owed to her by law.
Fourth, and this is the point I want to underscore; the amounts covered under the Group Life Insurance must be meaningful. Section 4(5) of the Pension Reform Act provides for a minimum of three times the annual total emolument. For a rank-and-file soldier or constable earning a modest salary, three times that salary is still a pitifully small sum in today’s Nigeria. The government should, by executive order or legislative amendment, raise the minimum multiple to five- or ten-times annual emolument for all personnel deployed to active conflict zones. The marginal cost of increasing the coverage multiple is small relative to the defence budget. The impact on morale, recruitment, and the confidence of troops would be enormous.
Finally, the families of those who have already fallen and waited years for payments that never came deserve an acknowledgement that the system failed them, and a structured back-payment programme that includes compensation for the years of delay. A widow who waited from 2012 to 2023 to receive her husband’s insurance payout has suffered a financial and psychological injury that the face value of the cheque does not begin to address. The Institute for Security Studies put it well: the welfare of military widows is directly linked to the morale of serving soldiers. Taking adequate care of the families of the fallen sends a signal to the entire defence establishment that their sacrifice will not be in vain. That signal must be sent now, clearly and unmistakably.
Nigeria spends billions annually on the entitlements of former presidents, dead and alive. We allocate trillions to a defence architecture that is overwhelmingly recurrent. Yet the simple act of paying an insurance premium so that a soldier’s widow does not have to beg, so that a police officer’s children do not drop out of school, so that the men and women at the frontlines can fight with some measure of peace in their hearts remains beyond us. This is not a resource problem. It is a priority problem. It is a problem of moral seriousness. And until it is fixed, every ceremony, every wreath laid at the Cenotaph, every speech about honouring our fallen heroes, will ring hollow.
Pay the premium. Honour the obligation. It is the least we owe those who stand guard so the rest of us can sleep.
Alachi is a
Gender and Development Professional
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