Nigeria’s telecom sector is facing the threat of a shutdown as workers from the Private Telecommunications and Communications Senior Staff Association have gone on strike.
Secretary-General Okonu Abdullahi, on Monday revealed in a statement that the union intends to disrupt telecommunications services across the country.
Abdullahi stated that over 800 union members are employed across various Nigerian telecom company facilities, network centres, and other critical telecommunications sites, including IHS and Huawei.
The union’s demands include the reinstatement of dismissed workers, official recognition of the union, better working conditions, and the remittance of membership dues.
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“The strike has become inevitable because of the prevalent precarious working conditions our members are enduring in the sector, the refusal of the employers to recognize and respect the constitutional right of these workers to freely associate with the union, and the unjust sack of three members of the union,” he stated in the seven-day strike notice.
“The implications of the strike will be massive because we have told all our members not to respond to any service outage from our employers.
“The fact remains that there are outages every day, and if our engineers do not respond to those outages, subscribers in those areas will be affected,” he said.
Reacting to the development, Gbenga Adebayo, Chairman of the Association of Licensed Telecom Operators of Nigeria, said that the group is not known to its members, which include Airtel, Globacom, 9-mobile, MTN and other telcos in the country.
“This group is not known to us in ALTON, and the companies mentioned are not members of ALTON”, he stated.