MTN Nigeria Recalls Over 90% Disengaged Visafone Employees

MTN Nigeria has said that it has recalled over 90 per cent of Visafone employees excluding drivers and office assistants it disengaged following its acquisition of the company. 

One of the recalled staff who craved anonymity confirmed the development and added that they are now awaiting their new salary remuneration 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,” he said.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 revealed that MTN did not want to take on liabilities originally 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,” he added.

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 with free airtime CDMA network to another level but, it could not compete with its GSM counterparts that always enjoyed governmental support. In a related development, MTN Nigeria has commenced massive customers’ biometrics revalidation/profiling, as the company now entices customers with free airtime in lieu of their biometrics registration.

The operator with over 65 million subscribers is presently in legal battle with the industry reg-ulator, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) for her failure to deactivate about 5.4mil-lion subscribers with incomplete SIM card registration. And, in a bid to lure the subscriber to the biometric revalidation exercise, MTN Nigeria is giving the customers free airtime up to N10,000, usable only when the full biometrics registration is confirmed by the network.

Daily Times investigation revealed that the subscribers on the network who have recently updated their data capturing and user’s profile are also receiving the same Short Message Service (SMS) apart from new users on the network directing them to go to the nearest centre to do fresh registration.

The investigations also show that, part from MTN’s regulator customer centres which are operated by her partners, the operator has been creating new clusters of registration centres at some strategic locations in Lagos state with a view to getting closer to the subscribers. A subscriber on the network who spoke to Daily Times on condition of anonymity said an MTN SMS sent to her read thus: ”You have been compensated with N10, 000 valid for 7-days to activate, please visit any MTN registration outlet to update your biometrics”.