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The income being
generated from the South Atlantic 3 (SAT-3) is not enough to finance
the workers’ 25 months arrears, officials of the Nigerian
Telecommunication Limited (NITEL) have said.

The SAT-3 cable,
owned by a 36-member consortium, runs from Portugal and Spain to South
Africa, through some West African countries such as Benin, Togo, Niger,
and Nigeria, of which NITEL owns 8.39%. SAT-3 system provides a path
for telecom traffic and is the only optical fiber link between West
Africa and the rest of the world.

In a telephone
interview, Sule Shehu, the spokesperson of NITEL, said, “The income we
are making out of SAT-3 is not too regular. What we get from SAT-3 we
also use to pay back for membership of the consortium. So, what is left
is then ploughed into maintenance by way of providing power, diesel,
etc.”

Abandoned Infrastructures

Mr. Shehu explained that the challenge with SAT-3 is as a result of the neglected infrastructures over the years.

“Right now, the
service of SAT-3 is only restricted to Lagos; no service in Abuja or
the rest part of the country because the transmission backbone is not
functioning beyond Lagos. Our network has been inactive; when last did
you use NITEL lines or connection working? At the moment, our customers
are strictly Lagos-based, and that is why we plough the little income
we get back into SAT-3, just to make sure the Lagos end is still in
service and pay for our membership of being part of the consortium.
There is no operation across the country because the backbone has been
abandoned for years,” he said.

Mr. Shedu also said
the two weeks’ salary that was paid by the NITEL management to some
workers in March, 2010, was meant to alleviate some of their financial
problems.

He, however, added that there is nothing the company’s management can do as the unpaid arrears also affect the management.

“As a worker, I
feel very bad and sorry because we have families and dependants and
struggle to meet up with our obligations. It is not a good experience,
but as a management staff what can I do? The situation is not in our
hands; the situation is beyond us. Neither I, nor the management can do
anything about it,” added Mr. Shehu.

Waiting on Government

Following last
week’s violent protest by the workers, the union members said they
believe the situation would be resolved this week.

Elias Kazzah, the
union leader, also in a telephone interview, said, “There is no new
development on the issue because we learnt that the minister is out of
the country.”

Kenneth Ndu, a
NITEL worker, said: “We believe our salary issue would be resolved by
next week. We are to meet with Ms. Akunyili next week Tuesday (June 1,
2010) and after the meeting, we hope that our salaries would be paid.

“The presentation
the minister asked us to submit has been sent to her office. but on
reaching her office on Wednesday, we found she was out of the country.
We are optimistic that through the minister, President Goodluck
Jonathan would come to our plight,” added Mr. Ndu.

However, the
spokesperson of the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), Chukwuma
Nwokoh, said that the BPE has no plans to settle the workers’ salaries
as no directive has been received from the National Council on
Privatization (NCP) regarding this.

“Nothing has
changed. We did send our suggestions on how to handle the issue to the
federal government, but we have not got their approval. We empathized
with workers, and that is why we always engage them on what we are
doing,” Mr. Nwokoh said.

“Last week, when some of the NITEL workers visited BPE, we asked
them to give us more time as we expect to get a response from the
federal government soon,” he said.