Labour export should be accompanied by controls
What you need to know:
- The issue: Labour export.
- Our view: Government needs to directly get involved to ensure the welfare and working conditions of their citizens in Oman is secure and abuses are stopped. A country has a great role to protect its nationals beyond the rhetoric.
Government has frozen the export of Ugandans to work in Oman, in the Middle East, pending a probe into a litany of alleged grotesque rights violations and abuses. This is not the first ban government is imposing on the labour export to Oman. Last year, Uganda blocked job hunters particularly domestic workers from going to Oman, saying it cannot guarantee that the workers will be safe while on duty there.
Minister of Gender Janat Mukwaya while issuing the ban in 2017 recounted a spate of rising cases of abuse on Uganda girls in the Middle East, some of which included sexual molestation, torture or denial of pay. She also said Oman had registered the highest number of incidents of human trafficking where Ugandans have emerged victims.
This second suspension, therefore, needs to come with stringent measures to ensure good comes from it.
The Monitor has reported several cases of victims’ testimonies, detailing alleged ill-treatment of Ugandan women hired as domestic workers in Oman and turned into sex slaves. It is also reported that most victims are individuals processed for the jobs by companies that have not signed up with Uganda government to regularise their business, presenting to authorities a challenge of how to trace their whereabouts or demand accountability.
On top of this, the victims are fleeced; they pay through the nose to access these jobs in Oman where they end up molested.
The catalyst is the high rate of unemployment in the country standing at about 80 per cent, according to the Uganda National Bureau of Standards 2017 report, which has left the youth very vulnerable.
However, beyond bans and suspensions, government needs to directly get involved to ensure the welfare and working conditions of their citizens in Oman is secure and abuses are stopped. A country has a great role to protect its nationals beyond the rhetoric. The mere fact that this is a second ban in a year means that enough was not done to stem the problem.
Government, as it regulates the labour exports, should also look into the issue of the obscene amounts of money people are paying to secure jobs in the Middle East, given that the same nationals are unemployed here with limited resources to secure jobs abroad.
We, therefore, commend government for setting up an ad hoc committee to investigate this and as well as the proposal to dispatch a fact-finding team to Muscat, Oman to confer with officials over there and help Uganda determine whether to terminate forever the export of Ugandans for jobs in Oman or not.
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