MTN Nigeria has said that it has recalled over 90 per cent of Visafone employees it sacked following its acquisition of the company.
According to Daily Sun, all disengaged staff, excluding drivers and office assistants, have now been recalled.
One of the recalled staff, confirmed the development and added that they are now awaiting their new salary renumeration packages and work guidelines.
“When we were asked to leave, we were given only three months salaries in lieu of notice, which was not too good because some of us have put in five to 10 years of service. Visafone Communications came into Nigeria at a time when the defunct Multi-Links and Starcoms were dominating the CDMA sector. It broke their monopoly and instantly became the fourth largest network in the country.”
On the number of staff affected, our source said about 500 and not 2,000 as reported by a national daily were involved because of the consecutive lay-off in 2013 and 2015 respectively.
He further stated that MTN did not want to take on liabilities initially until it discovered that its technical crew could not understand the CDMA network, which it acquired because of its spectrum.
“When MTN realised that it does not understand how the CDMA works, it had to appeal to us to come back to put them through the network.”
Prior to Wednesday’s sack, Visafone had laid off half of its workforce in 2013 and early 2015 in anticipation of the acquisition.
Visafone was founded by Mr. Jim Ovia with the aim to take CDMA network to another level but, it could not compete with its GSM counterparts that enjoyed governmental support always.
