A strike by workers’ at Nigeria’s first national telephone carrier Nitel is playing havoc with the country’s main gateway for international calls and Internet connections, telecoms operators said on Friday.
The South Atlantic Terminal III (SAT-3) key underwater cable has been shut down for most of the week, denying the former state-run firm much-needed revenue and leaving many businesses in Nigeria stranded.
Telecom operators, including the local unit of South Africa’s MTN Group (MTNJ.J), warned their customers early on Thursday that Internet services would be interrupted.
The unions called an indefinite strike on Monday to put pressure on the government to pay a 4.5 billion naira ($96.5 million) debt it owes to the cash-strapped fixed line and mobile operator, union leaders said.
As well, the unions are demanding seven months of back pay totalling 2.5 billion naira and a speedy turnaround of the firm’s fortunes, which have declined sharply since Nitel was privatised in 2006.
The strike has also closed Nitel’s corporate offices in the capital Abuja, the commercial hub of Lagos and other major cities in Africa’s most populous nation.
A Nitel spokesman said the management can only plead with the protesting workers to suspend the strike because four of their five demands have to do with the government and not the company.
“We can’t do anything about the strike, so we are appealing to the workers to return to work, and open the offices and SAT-3,” Nitel spokesman Sule Shehu said.
The underwater cable was completely shut in 2006 by a workers’ strike that rendered it almost impossible to make calls internationally or even between fixed lines within Nigeria.
The facility was again shut for over a month in October to fix damages on the main telephone gateway.
Nitel, once Nigeria’s top operator with more than half a million fixed lines, has been on the decline since the advent of the GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) technology in 2001 in Africa’s fastest-growing telecoms market.
The company, which was privatised in 2006, is owed several billions of naira in unpaid bills. Its functional fixed lines have fallen to less than 100,000 and subscribers to its mobile arm M-tel have nose-dived to a few thousand from over 1.3 million three years ago.
Local industrial conglomerate Transcorp (TCNP.LG), which took control of the ailing firm over two years ago after a series of failed moves to privatise it, has so far been unable to reverse its decline.