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The management of
the Nigeria Telecommunications Limited (NITEL) has said the national
carrier’s workers were party to the decision of the federal government
to sack 2,900 of the 3,389 work force.

NITEL spokesperson,
Sule Shehu, in a telephone interview said, “What I know is that when
the report was submitted, we are told that the committee consists of
ministers, National Council on Privatization (NCP), officials from the
Bureau for Public Enterprises (BPE) and some NITEL union leaders etc so
it means that even the NITEL workers were represented in the committee
and are aware of the task force’s decisions to downsize the workers.

“The committee has
recommended that some of the workers should be downsized which we all
saw when they were presenting their report to the vice-president, so we
have to wait for the federal government’s reaction,” added Mr. Shehu.

No operation

He said the committee’s recommendation justifies the fact that NITEL is not operational at present.

“But part of the
recommendation states that they should pay the workers all their
entitlements and the committee has favoured that first scenario.
Although, the task force advised the FG government to take a decision
and government is advised to quickly resolve the issue because
unnecessary cost is being accumulated since NITEL is not working.”

The task force had
recommended three scenarios, which were: to disengage all current
employees and immediately re-engage 445 transition staff from the 3389
staff, with a monthly wage bill of N115.5 million, down from the
current N695 million. The reengaged staff will remain to hand over to a
new core investor; to disengage all employees who are currently aged 45
and above and those that have served 25 years and above – which will
reduce the work force by approximately 66% of the staff and reduce
monthly wage bill from N695 million to N187.6 million. The third option
is to disengage all employees who are aged above 50 and employees that
have served 35 years and above. This, the task force says, is capable
of reducing the wage bill from N695 million to N313.8 million.

Union disagrees

Emmanuel Abu, the
chairman of the Senior Staff Association of Communications, Transport
and Corporations, NITEL, Abuja said NITEL union leaders were not part
of the task force’s committee and would not accept the downsizing of
workers.

“What we are
interested in first is to pay the workers, after the payment of the
workers we would battle the second issue which is the downsizing of
workers. After the payment of the workers, we will talk about the
downsizing issue; it’s a bridge and when we get there we will cross it.”

“We thank God that
the report has been submitted to the vice-president and might be with
the president by next week,” added Mr. Abu.

However, last
month, some workers said they would prefer to be laid off than for
government to keep them idle in their offices without pay. Mr.Abu said
that such comments by the workers were made out of frustration.

“Those comments
were said out of frustrations because they are being owed money for
over 27months. What do you expect from them but after collecting that
money, a worker can recoup himself and say this country belongs to all
of us.”

The committee
advised the federal government to look into the bid of NITEL that was
concluded in February, 2010. The bid result that was announced by the
bureau declared New Generation consortium as the preferred bidder with
a bid of $2.5 billion for NITEL.

However, the
spokesperson for BPE, Chukwuma Nwokoh, said that there is no present
update on the bid result for NITEL as the bureau is still waiting the
federal government’s decision on the review committee report.

“There is no update on the NITEL bid; we are still awaiting the
decision of the president on the report submitted by the review
committee.”