Abuja — Workers of the troubled Nigerian Telecommunications Limited and the Nigerian Mobile Telecommunications Limited (Mtel) have threatened the Bureau of Public Enterprises over their unpaid 16 months salary arrears.

Consequently, the workers announced their preparedness to embark on an indefinite strike action until their salary arrears are paid.

Before now, the workers had embarked on a number of strikes to protest the non-payment of their arrears, which they said had caused severe hardship, and blamed the BPE for being nonchallant and insincere.

They blamed the BPE for the hardship they are going through at the moment.

Although the workers are not currently on strike, they said they cannot come to work unless government settles the accumulated salaries.

It was learnt that after a meeting of the workers' union, the BPE and the management board of the two organisations, an agreement was reached that the workers would be paid five months' salary.

But the latest information available to LEADERSHIP indicates that both the BPE and management board of the two telecom firms have reneged on the agreement.

Some of the workers who spoke to our correspondent said that the management had informed them that instead of the five months agreed on, only one month was to be paid, with the remaining four months coming later after staff verification exercise.

But as at Wednesday, November 25, the management of both organisations was yet to pay the one month which they promised.

In a telephone interview, the head of Corporate Affairs of Mtel, Mr Abdulhamid Umar, told LEADERSHIP that the BPE had agreed to pay five months out of the 16 months owed the workers, only to renege without any cogent reason.

Reacting, the head of Public Affairs of BPE, Mr Chigbo Anichebe, said the National Council on Privatisation (NCP) approved that five months salaries should be paid, starting from the time the Federal Government took over, but it is still looking for money. He said that the council was trying to borrow money from the liquidator and pay the five months approved.

Also speaking, the National President, National Association of Telecommunication Employees (NATE), Mr Charles Amankwe, said while the senior workers are owed 16 months, the junior workers are being owed 17 months.

Blaming the entire problem on the BPE, which is now the secretariat of the NCP, Amankwe wondered why the privatisation agency reneged on the agreement reached with the workers two weeks ago.

According to him, the delay in the payment of the salary as agreed was due to administrative bottlenecks.

On the planned privatisation, the union leaders said unbundling NITEL before privatisation would not yield any result.

"That type of privatisation is what we call vulcanisation, vulcanisation in the sense that NITEL will be split before the eventual sale", he said.

Amankwe disclosed that NITEL/Mtel workers would have preferred a single buyer instead of splitting the company into different parts. He was of the opinion that unbundling the company before privatisation was a bad idea because bidders such as MTN, Etisalat and Globacom were only interested in NITEL because of the undersea cable, SAT-3.

The NATE president stated that if SAT-3 is sold as a separate firm, it would be difficult to sell the others, but if it is sold as a single firm, it would still attract buyers because of SAT-3.

The Minister of Information and Communications, Prof. Dora Akunyili, recently asked BPE to expedite action on the privatisation of NITEL to prevent further depreciation of the value of organisations.

She said: "Each time I remember what NITEL was and what it is now, it makes my heart bleed because NITEL was working very well in the 1970s and 80s but suddenly it went down".

Akunyili, who blamed NITEL's problem on bad management, said, "If the place was properly run, why did it collapse? NITEL was making money. NITEL should be self-sustaining. If private operators are making fortune in this country within seven years, then, NITEL should have made more".

The minister said the only solution to NITEL's problem was to hand it over to the private investor through privatisation.