With four months remaining before Cameroon’s third mobile telephone provider opens its doors to operation, the social climate at Viettel Cameroon is anything, but serene.

Indeed, over the last few days, the company’s employees have been bombarding the Cameroonian media with reports of heavy recruitment of Vietnamese executives to the detriment of local workers. The practice has made relations between Cameroonians and Vietnamese employees difficult.

According to the employees, Viettel Cameroon currently has 317 predominantly senior employees out of a total of 600 on staff. Company heads of challenged this claim with the estimate that the number of Vietnamese recruited is between 100 and 150. At the signing of its contract in 2012, the Vietnamese company had announced the creation of 6,300 jobs in the country.

Interviewed by the daily government publication about what has been referred to as “an invasion of Vietnamese workers” at Viettel Cameroon, the company’s Managing Director, Moïse Bayi, presented the issue as a matter of “technical assistance”. “They are here to build the network. The Vietnamese executives have been brought here for the transfer of technology. We wish to build our own products instead of using the infrastructure of our competitors.”

However, the head of the Vietnamese company’s subsidiary admits that there are cultural barriers between Vietnamese and Cameroonian staff which does not always make the job easier. “We have a western mentality. They share with us and we share with them. We are learning to work together.

It is true that, at first, we had some problems but these are steadily dissolving,” stated the Managing Director of Viettel Cameroon, the telecommunications company that has delayed its official launch twice for technical reasons.

A few months ago, it was a quarrel between Vietnamese and Cameroonian that started within the company. The disagreement concerned the division of the company’s social capital. But, in March 2014, a compromise was reached between Nguyen Duy Tho, Managing Director of Viettel Global JSC, and Ahmadou Baba Danpullo, the head of Bestinver Cameroon, the Vietnamese company’s local partner.

The arrangement between the two parties involves Ahmadou Baba Danpullo remaining as chairman of the board at Viettel Cameroon, keeping 30% of capital. In exchange, Nguyen Duy Tho becomes deputy chairman of the board while the company, which was a limited liability company becomes a public limited company with 20 million FCfa in capital.