The affected workers which include people who have worked for a minimum of five years and people who had been with the company since its inception in Nigeria in 2001 left the company on Friday, having embraced the firm’s offer of voluntary disengagement.

A source in the company told Punch that “MTN offered a package to workers who have stayed for five years and above a voluntary exit package because it felt that most of them are not able to contribute much to the development of the company going forward.

“If, for instance, you have kids, you can’t compare the knowledge you have about the mobile phone with what they can do about telecoms services; they are more dexterous; so, the company wants to hire younger people who can keep pace with evolving trends in the industry instead of retaining those whose knowledge is limited to what they knew 16 years ago.”

To compensate the workers who opted for voluntary exit and those forced out, it was gathered that the company offered to pay them three weeks’ total wages multiplied by the number of years they had spent in the firm, in addition to the balances in their Retirement Savings Accounts under the Contributory Pension Scheme.

However, this has not gone down well with the majority of the workers, who had expected a generous payout like the firm approved for engineers whose services were transferred to service providers when MTN decided to outsourced some non-core services to other firms.