A new disengagement policy introduced by telecommunication giant MTN Nigeria for staff to take the option of voluntarily leaving the company has been turned down by employees who described it as offering paltry severance package.
MTN Nigeria rolled out the new Voluntarily Severance Scheme (VSS) in February, “as a systematic process of refreshing” the company and gave interested qualified staff three days to apply.
The scheme, which has approval of the telecom company’s board, targeted “full-time, national staff” who worked with MTN Nigeria for a minimum of eight years or more as of Friday, February 12, 2021.
An internal memo that communicated the new scheme to staff last month, said the idea of the VSS was to create “a pathway for employees who have been thinking of moving on.”
The document further stated that the goal was to allow qualified employees to “leave the business on a mutually agreed basis to pursue other career or personal interests and provide a monetary package to support them.”
“Interested staff will receive three weeks’ gross salary for every completed year of service,” the memo added.
Affected staff were asked to indicate their interest latest before the close of business on February 17, 2021.
But employees of the company told Dateline Nigeria that the policy was outrightly rejected by most of the staff because the package it proposed was too poor.
They said many staff opted not to take it because it was not as rich as MTN was making it look.
They said contrary to the claim by MTN Nigeria that it would provide monetary package to support staff that take the option, the amount that most of the staff would get, despite the number of years they have worked, would be a paltry amount.
“Take, for instance, those staff that have worked for 10 years and are earning N400,000 a month, as managers level 3. If they choose to go, based on MTN’s offer and mathematics, they stand to get only N3million each. That is after all that they have done for the company in 10 years. The amount is too poor,” one of the staffers who does not want to be named for fear of victimization, said.
“It was because of this reason that most of us did not apply,” the staff added.
Other staff members told Dateline Nigeria that it would have been in their interest to take the offer and leave if it was good because, according to them, there is no guaranteed career progression in the job.
“One practice that is common here is that we are not promoted , no matter the number of years that we have spent working for the company. What they do instead is when a position becomes vacant, they advertise it and you can see six people applying for it. What you get at the end of the day is someone who has been your subordinate being picked to become your boss,” a staff said.
“On some occasions, people who were in school when you joined MTN will come in and the next day they become your bosses. This is helped by the fact that after all the tests and interviews for a vacant position, certain people in the system will influence the selection in favour of their candidates.
“There are people who have been here for 16 years and have not moved a step up the ladder. They are on the same position they have been the very day they came in. They would have been somewhere up a long time ago if competence, not influence, was the major consideration,” he said.
“If they had made the package a bit more attractive, it would have been an exodus out of here,” he added.
The VSS, the employees claim, was MTN’s way of avoiding a confrontation with labour unions. They said, in the past, the telecom company applied a policy of Involuntary Severance Scheme to disengage its staff members and then pay them whatever amount “it liked”.
According to them, MTN Nigeria was forced to jettison that policy after a section of its staffers unionized and got the support of other labour unions to kick against it.
MTN Senior Manager in charge of External Relations, Funsho Aina, did not respond to a request for comment.
