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The National Social Security Authority (NSSA) has split its investment policy into three strategic areas to ensure that future investments provide significant returns, a senior company official has said.

The authority has widely been criticized for repeatedly failing to put contributors’ funds to good use by making sound investment decisions, instead pouring millions of dollars into a spate of bad investments over the years.

NSSA board chairman Robin Vela said NSSA’s investment policy would be split into three strategic areas, namely; property, money market and strategic assets.

“We have started to look at our investment policy, but the real detailed work requires the presence of the executive which we now have in place,” he said following the appointment of a substantive management team for the authority.

“We have actually scheduled to take a strategic time out as a management team and a board in the next month or so where we will try to dissect all operations of NSSA not just the investment policy. So we are to dissect and re-look all aspects to ensure that at the end of the day the service delivery that we give to our pensioners and our contributors is what is paramount.” Mr Vela said NSSA was going to sweat out some strategic assets such as the National Building Society to ensure that it delivers significant investment income return per annum.

“We are also going to lean on them (strategic assets) in terms of what we should be doing better in terms of delivering on our mandate,” he said.

NSSA is one of the economy’s biggest institutional investors and is a major player on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange.

Last month, the authority reported a major net profit slump to $32,3 million for the full year ended December 2015 from $104 million in 2014 on the back of revaluation losses.

In the period NSSA saw its income decline to $331,2 million from $335,2 million the previous year as collections fell while investment earnings also dropped to $22,8 million from $35 million. – New Ziana.