THE National Insurance Appeal Board has been out of existence for the past two years in Region 2 the chairman of the board has been sick and the board has not been meeting to conduct the people affairs as such many appeal are in backlog.

The appeal system malfunction and operates inefficiently it need new trained, highly skilled members, at every meeting of the appeal committee there should be three members, one of whom shall be the chairman and one who may be a co-opted member, shall form a quorum, but there was no quorum for the past two years. It is improbable that this came about as the primary objective of the system.
A new chairman was recommended to replace the ailing one, but he was rejected for some reasons or the other, and in any case only those who hugged the soup bowl were likely to get the job. The idea that race should not run unless the initial opportunities were equal was not much thought of by those who controlled the apparatus of the state, and it was therefore none of the business of the Government or the Chairman of the National Insurance Board (NIS) to seek to correct the system so as to give every backlogged appeal case an equal and fair chance to be heard.
It is the duty that all acts of the appeal committee, and all application coming or arising before the committee, shall be done and decided by the majority of votes of such members of the committee as are present and vote thereon. So, the first noteworthy point is that the appeal committee is non-functional and consequently largely irrelevant to our expectation to expedite our matters here in Region 2. The imbalance within the NIS system imposes constraints, friction and inhibitions which renders it an unacceptable one for our region.
We need a new appeal board which recognises frankly and from the beginning that it is the duty for them to intervene actively in the affairs of its NIS contributors with the view to guaranteeing them some minimum level of fairness when dealing with their cases. The state should be actively concerned not merely to preserve but to improve the quality of its service for NIS pensioners.

MOHAMED KHAN