Nigeria’s insurance market work pace is vividly different from other developed markets where pension contribution is emblazoned on market performance, but in this clime it has journeyed alone since 2004 when pension was severed and the market now stands unattached with 2.5 million total policies written (2,485,763).
A breakdown of this performance indicate that policies held by individual Nigerians up until 2021 was 1.3 million (1,334,855), while corporate and non-individual policies was 1.1 million (1,150,908).
These figures released by National Insurance Commission market development czar, Rasaaq Salami, who heads Corporate Communication & Market Development, formed part of recent expose of NAICOM’s Market Development Initiatives, The Journey So Far .
This performance Salami stated, puts the insurance penetration as at December 2020 at about 1% is squarely set at 0.88%. This level of penetration the released stats showed, produced a gross written premium of N630bn in 2021.
However, the stats points to hope of rejuvenation of policies uptake and of particular note is a compulsory policy, public building liability insurance, which is steadily gaining traction across the country from near zero a couple of years ago to 8,246 policies in 2021.
States performance put Lagos ahead with 5,007; followed by Oyo, 455; Federal Capital Territory FCT, 346; Kano was next with 344; while Rivers and others settled with 340.
The gross premium income from this emerging new compulsory front is N9.10bn (N9,109,531119.56). Also encouraging was that there were reports of uptake in Borno, Kebbi, Taraba, Zamfara, Katsina, Niger, and Plateau states in the north and emerging trend of uptake in group life insurance from Adamawa, Kano, and Kaduna states.
