Frequently asked
Questions members ask
Twenty questions, answered with the union's published terms — and, where the union has not published something, with a plain statement that it has not. Nothing here is softened, and the hardest questions are at the bottom, answered rather than avoided.
How to read the answers
Every figure quoted on this page comes from the union's operational terms: ₦1,000 a share, 100 shares as the minimum subscription in a project, 30% annual interest on savings, twelve uninterrupted months before a withdrawal, three months before a loan, and dividends at the financial year end on 31 December. If an answer on this page ever disagrees with the terms, the terms are the document that counts and the office should be told about the difference.
Several answers say "the union has not published this yet". That is not a polite way of avoiding the question. It means there is no published rule, that you should ask the office directly, and that you are entitled to the answer in writing before you commit money. Those gaps are listed together at the bottom of this page so you can hold the union to them.
Ask in person · every Saturday, 5:00pm
On this page
Four groups. Joining and clusters. Savings, loans and dividends. Streams of income and the back office. Trust and safety — which answers whether this is a Ponzi scheme, whether your money is insured, who holds it, and what happens when things go wrong.
If an answer here is contradicted by a person
Somebody speaking in the union's name may tell you something this page does not say — a higher rate, a shortcut, a payment to a personal account. Write to requizacooperative@gmail.com with what was said and who said it, and do not pay until the office answers.
Group one
Joining and clusters
Membership is open to any adult who can save with a cluster and can be reached afterwards. You register on this site and your cluster confirms you at a Saturday meeting.
The union's registration record asks three things of a new member, and they are the three green-or-red lines you will see in your own back office: registration completed; whether you have an Android phone; and whether you will be an active saver, with every entry captured online — daily, weekly or monthly. Nothing is hidden behind those three.
What the union has not published on this site is a minimum age, a list of identity documents, or a residency rule. Ask the office, or your cluster secretary, what your cluster wants to see before you travel to a meeting.
Two prices are published and both belong to shares, not to registration: one ordinary share is ₦1,000, and the minimum subscription in a project is 100 shares, which is ₦100,000.
The union has not published a registration fee, a monthly administration charge, or a minimum amount you must save each week. So the honest answer is that no joining fee appears anywhere in the union's published terms. If somebody asks you for one, ask to see the union's written schedule of fees first, insist on a receipt, and never pay a fee into an individual's personal account. If a registration fee is ever introduced it will appear in the operational terms where every member can read it.
Every cluster meets on Saturday at 5:00pm. The meeting is where savings are handed over and entered: the cluster's financial secretary records, for each member, that week's savings, any loan taken, any loan repayment and any investment. Entries are captured online, so what happens in the room should be visible in your back office the same day.
Go if you can. The meeting is also where members hear what the union's businesses are doing and where a question can be put to a person's face, which is worth more than an email.
The union has not published a rule allowing a member to save through somebody else or to pay in remotely. Ask your cluster before you rely on it, and never hand cash to another member without watching the entry being made and taking a record of it.
Yes, and it is the union's first vision point: establish cooperative clusters in rural and urban settings across Africa. A member offering to open a cluster in a new town is doing the union's core work, not asking a favour.
Write to the office with where you are, roughly how many people you can gather, and where they could meet on a Saturday at 5:00pm.
The union has not published the minimum number of members a cluster needs, the officer roles it must fill, or how a financial secretary is appointed and issued an access code for the entry page. Ask for that in writing before you collect anybody's money. Collecting savings without an appointed secretary and a recorded entry is exactly the situation the union's own controls exist to prevent.
Group two
Savings, loans and dividends
Savings are captured daily, weekly or monthly, and every entry is recorded online. The rhythm the terms are actually built around is weekly, because the two rules that decide what you are owed both count weeks: twelve months of weekly, uninterrupted saving before you may withdraw, and three months of consistent saving before you may request a loan.
The union has not published a minimum amount for each entry. Choose an amount you can still pay in a bad month rather than the largest you can pay in a good one. The terms reward not breaking the line far more than they reward a big entry — a member saving ₦1,000 every Saturday for fifty-two weeks is in a stronger position than a member who saved ₦10,000 for eight weeks and stopped.
The published term is 30% annual interest on savings, paid at the end of the member's financial year. It comes with a condition that belongs in the same breath: savings are held for twelve months, weekly and uninterrupted, before a withdrawal. So the 30% is the reward for a completed savings year. It is not a rate that money earns for sitting in the ledger for two months.
The union's financial year ends on 31 December.
Here is the part you should press the office on. The union has not published how the interest is calculated on a balance that grows week by week — whether on the closing balance, on the average balance across the year, or on each entry from the date it was made. Those three methods give materially different amounts on the same savings record. Ask which method your cluster's accounts use, and get the answer in writing well before your first year ends.
A member may request a loan after three months of consistent savings — thirteen Saturdays. That is the only loan condition the union has published.
What is not published: how much you may borrow against your savings, the interest charged, the repayment period, whether a guarantor is required, and what happens if a repayment is missed. Do not plan around a loan until you have those in writing from the office. A loan whose terms you learned by word of mouth is a loan you will argue about later.
What is published is the record-keeping: your loan and every repayment are entered by your cluster's financial secretary in the same weekly entry as your savings, so the position is visible in your back office rather than in somebody's notebook.
One ordinary share is ₦1,000. The minimum subscription in a project is 100 shares, ₦100,000. Dividends come from the cooperative's businesses and are distributed at the end of the financial year, on 31 December. Eligibility carries its own condition: active and uninterrupted savings for twelve months.
So a dividend needs two things from you at the same time — a shareholding, and a savings year you did not break. A member can hold shares and still receive nothing because their savings were interrupted, and that is how the terms are written.
And it needs a third thing that is not a rule but a fact: the businesses must have made a surplus. A dividend is a distribution of profit. Where there is no profit there is no dividend, and nothing on this site says otherwise.
It is a separate published term: 15% quarterly return on investment. It is not the savings account, and it is not the 30% annual interest that savings earn at the end of an uninterrupted year. Treat it as a different product with different rules.
The union has not published on this site what the package invests in, the minimum amount, how long the money is committed, how or when a member exits, or what happens in a quarter where the underlying business does not earn 15%. Those are precisely the questions that decide whether a quarterly rate is real or is being paid out of somebody else's deposit.
Ask the office for the package's own written terms, read them against this page, and if the written terms and this page disagree, tell the office before you pay anything.
Group three
Streams of income and the back office
Two things share the name, and it saves confusion to keep them apart.
The first is the union's. Every quarter the cooperative creates a new stream of income — a business — and the equity in it is split 20% to the cooperative and 80% to the members who subscribed to it at ₦1,000 a share.
The second is yours. Your back office tracks your streams one, two, three, four, five and beyond as you activate them. That is the practical form of the union's fifth vision point: training members in a business school that teaches how to earn multiple streams of income.
Once a month you update your back office by entering the referral link for the next stream you have activated, so the union can confirm the activation. Those confirmations are what drive the campaigns, challenges and tasks the union sets its members.
Your back office then shows your downlines listed by generation, which streams each of them has activated by generation, and their phone numbers and email addresses so that you can follow up — alongside your own savings position, share position, loan status, cluster and referral link.
One honest caution, because it involves other people's details. The union has not published how long it keeps a member's contact details, who inside the union can see them, or how a member asks for them to be removed. If that matters to you — and it should, since you are entering other members' phone numbers — ask the office before you enter anybody else's information.
The union has published the structure — downlines listed by generation, activations tracked by generation, a monthly confirmation. It has not published any schedule of referral payments, commissions or bonuses.
So the honest answer is: do not join expecting one, and do not promise one to anybody you bring in. Say what is actually true when you invite somebody — they will save weekly with a cluster, they may request a loan after three months, their savings earn 30% at the end of an uninterrupted year, and their shares and savings are theirs.
If the union ever introduces payments for recruitment, they belong in the operational terms where anybody can read them and weigh them. Until they appear there, a person quoting you a referral bonus is quoting you something the union has not agreed to.
The union asks the question directly — "I have an Android phone: yes or no" is one of the three lines on your registration record — because savings are captured online and the back office is where you check them.
You are not turned away for answering no. But if you answer no, settle before you start how you will see your own record: your cluster's financial secretary can show you the entry at the meeting, and the back office opens in any browser on any device. What you should not do is rely on another member's phone to check your own money. The whole point of capturing entries online is that you do not have to take anybody's word for your balance.
Group four
Trust and safety
These are the questions a careful person asks, and a union that will not answer them does not deserve your Saturdays. The first one is open because it is the one most people are thinking about.
No — and rather than ask you to take that on faith, here is how to check.
A Ponzi scheme has two marks. The money paid to older members comes from newer members' deposits, and there is no business underneath producing a return. What this union says it is doing is the opposite: savings interest and dividends are to come from cooperative businesses — food production, food processing, food packaging and food distribution — and from the projects members subscribe to at ₦1,000 a share, in which the equity is split 20% to the cooperative and 80% to the members.
Now the part the union owes you. 30% a year on savings, even paid only at the end of an uninterrupted twelve months, is a high rate — and a high rate is a claim about a business. The right response to a claim is not faith, it is questions: which business, what does it sell, to whom, at what margin, and where are the accounts. The financial year ends on 31 December, so there is a date by which accounts should exist and a member is entitled to ask for them.
And what is not yet on this site: the registration number, the registered office, the names of the officers and any audited accounts are all marked "to be published". Until they are published, you are entitled to ask for them and entitled to keep your money until you have them. A cooperative asking for weekly savings should expect that.
One test settles it in the end. If the answer to "where does the return come from" ever becomes "from bringing in more members", stop paying, tell your cluster, and write to the office. That answer is the definition of the thing you are asking about.
No. Requiza Cooperative Union is a cooperative, not a bank. Deposit insurance protects money held in licensed banks; it does not cover savings held by a cooperative society, and no government body guarantees the 30% annual interest on savings.
The union has not published an insurance policy, a guarantee fund or a reserve held against member savings. If it arranges any of those, the insurer and the policy will be named on this site so members can check it independently.
Until then, hold the right picture in your head: your savings are money placed with a cooperative under its own written terms. That is a real obligation and the union intends to meet it — but it is an obligation of this union, backed by this union's businesses, not by the state.
Dividends stop first. A dividend is a distribution of surplus, so a year with no surplus is a year with no dividend, however clean your savings record is. Shares can also fall in value, because a share is a stake in a business rather than a deposit — the ₦1,000 is what you paid, not a floor under what you hold.
Savings sit differently. The 30% annual interest, paid at the end of an uninterrupted savings year, is stated as a term of the union rather than as a share of profit. But a term is only as good as the union's ability to meet it, and that ability rests on the same businesses. Nobody should read the terms as a promise that survives a business failure, and the union will not pretend otherwise.
What the union has not published — and these four answers matter most in the worst case: how losses are shared between the cooperative and members; whether a member's liability is limited to the shares they hold; what reserve is kept against a bad year; and in what order members are paid if the union is ever wound up.
Ask the office for those four, and hold us to it. A cooperative that cannot answer them in writing is telling you something about itself.
It matters, because the word the terms use is "uninterrupted". Withdrawal needs twelve months of weekly, uninterrupted saving. Dividend eligibility needs active and uninterrupted savings for twelve months. A gap puts both at risk at once, and that is the single most expensive thing that can happen to a member's year.
What the union has not published is the remedy: whether a missed week can be made up by paying the arrears at the next meeting, whether there is any allowance for illness, travel or a funeral, or whether the twelve-month clock restarts from zero.
So do not assume you will be forgiven. Tell your financial secretary the day you know you will miss, ask what your cluster does, and ask the office to confirm it in writing. Then hold us to it — this is the rule the union most needs to publish plainly, and members asking for it is how it gets published.
Not under the published terms. Savings are held for twelve months of weekly, uninterrupted saving before a withdrawal. There is no published early-withdrawal route, no published hardship or emergency release, and no published penalty for breaking the year.
What does exist is the loan. After three months of consistent saving a member may request one, and for most members that is the practical way to reach cash without breaking a savings year. Its terms are not published, so ask for them before you need them rather than in the week you do.
The plain planning advice, which the union would rather give you now than have you learn in a bad month: do not put money into these savings that you may need within twelve months. Keep your emergency money somewhere you can reach it on a Tuesday, and save here with what is left.
There are two halves to this answer: what the union has published, and what it has not.
Published: your cluster's financial secretary enters every transaction — savings, loans, loan repayment and investment — on an entry page reached with an access code, and entries are captured online so that they appear in your own back office. That is the control that lets you check the room's arithmetic from your own phone instead of trusting a notebook.
Not published: the bank, the name on the account, and which officers sign on it. Those are marked "to be published" on this site alongside the registration number and the registered office. Ask for them.
Then follow one rule without exception. Money goes to the union, never into an individual's personal bank account or personal wallet, and you take a record the same week. If your entry has not appeared in your back office by the following Saturday, raise it at the meeting rather than waiting for it to sort itself out.
Do these in order, and do not skip to the end because somebody is in a hurry. Nobody at this union should ever be in a hurry for your money.
One. Go to a cluster meeting — Saturday, 5:00pm. See the room, the members and the secretary's sheet before you pay anything.
Two. Ask for the registration certificate and number. Cooperative societies are registered, and a registration number can be checked against the registry that issued it. On this site that number is marked "to be published", so ask the office for it and ask why it is not yet published.
Three. Ask for the registered office address, and go there.
Four. Write to requizacooperative@gmail.com from your own address, and keep the reply.
Five. Pay small first and follow the trail. Make one entry, then check it in your back office and against the secretary's sheet. A union that records ₦1,000 correctly is a union that can be trusted to record ₦100,000.
Six. Ask for accounts. The financial year ends 31 December, so ask what the businesses earned and what was distributed.
Seven. Watch for the two signs that end the conversation: a request to pay a person rather than the union, and a promise of a return that is not written in the operational terms.
If any step gets an evasive answer, that is your answer. Keep your money.
Held to account
What the union has not published yet
Every item below appeared in an answer on this page as "the union has not published this". They are collected here so no member has to hunt for them, and so the list can be checked against this page again in six months.
None of these gaps is a reason to panic. All of them are a reason to ask before you commit money, and to get the answer in writing. A member who asks is doing the union a service: questions are what turn an unwritten practice into a published rule.
Ask for each of these in writing
- Registration number
- To be published
- Registered office
- To be published
- Officers
- To be published
- Bank and signatories
- To be published
- Audited accounts
- To be published
- Interest calculation method
- To be published
- Loan amount, interest and repayment
- To be published
- Missed-week remedy
- To be published
- Special Investment Package terms
- To be published
- How losses are shared
- To be published
- Registration fee, if any
- None published
- Referral or commission schedule
- None published
If your question is not on this page, send it
The office answers, and questions that keep arriving get added here so the next member does not have to ask. You can also put it to your cluster on Saturday at 5:00pm.