Mr Charles Onyango-Obbo
The plight of young African women, including numerous Ugandans, toiling as maids in the Middle East—facing abuse, suffering, and even murder—has long been an open secret. Yet, just when you thought the situation couldn’t deteriorate further, it has.
A recent exposé in The New York Times (NYT) laid bare the horror with gripping journalism that stitched together the many threads of their torment. Let’s be clear: finding jobs abroad for unemployed Ugandans is a noble aim. But many aren’t earning a decent wage—they’re being ensnared into slavery. That’s not just immoral; it’s downright criminal.
Worse yet, African governments, hamstrung by diplomatic frailty and corrupted by rapacious labour-exporting agencies, have utterly failed to shield their citizens. Compare this to nations like the Philippines, which have crafted sturdy systems for their overseas workers, dubbed Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs).
The Philippines’ Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) guarantees minimum wage standards, compulsory insurance, legal support, emergency aid, and repatriation services.
Embassies and consulates offer refuges for maltreated workers. Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and India boast similar set-ups, albeit less refined. Most African countries, though, have nothing of the sort. The fallout is grim.
The NYT reported that at least 274 Kenyan workers—mostly women—perished in Saudi Arabia over the past five years. At least 55 died last year alone, twice the toll of the year before.
One Ugandan woman’s body bore marks of electrocution and widespread bruising. Many others mysteriously “fell” from rooftops and balconies. Employers in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states have starved, raped, beaten, or even knifed them.
Some agencies lure women with hollow promises of fair pay, only for them to sign indecipherable contracts on arrival. Worse still, some market women like goods—one website even featured a “click-to-collect” button. Once in the kingdom, employers often seize passports and possessions.
Housekeepers earn about $250 a month, yet many say they’re underpaid or denied wages entirely, with employers sneering: “I bought you.” The NYT pondered how this endures when these women are recruited by legitimate agencies and dispatched to Saudi Arabia through processes overseen by Ugandan, Kenyan, and Saudi officials. The answer? Corruption.
In Kenya and Uganda, senior officials and their kin hold stakes in labour-exporting firms. MPs leading labour oversight committees also run staffing outfits.
In Saudi Arabia, royals and high-ranking officials profit from agencies supplying domestic workers. Together, these vested interests undermine safeguards, thwart penalties for abusers, and stifle reforms that might dent their profits.
Broader economic currents are at work, too. Asian labour-exporting nations like Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines have slashed poverty, while many African states have slid backward. Grappling with debt and budget shortfalls, African governments are shoving their citizens into exploitative labour markets to plug fiscal holes. With aid dwindling and cheap credit drying up, this pattern will only deepen.
Feeble African states loath to ruffle Gulf powers like Saudi Arabia and the UAE—now pivotal economic and political players—dare not confront these outrages. Take Ethiopia: once a rising star before Covid-19 and its savage Tigray war wrecked its economy. By 2023, frantic for foreign cash, Ethiopia rolled out a plan to send 500,000 housemaids to Saudi Arabia, shrugging off past worries about human rights abuses. Its government even paused repatriation after bringing home 130,000 distressed citizens.
What makes this all the more baffling is that it’s unfolding under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler. MBS styles himself a reformer - women can now drive, cinemas have reopened - yet the persistent abuse of African workers stokes talk of an “Arab Slave Trade 2.0.” Given his lofty geopolitical dreams, you’d think MBS would want to dodge such parallels. This could also rekindle scrutiny of a grim history that paints Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle East in an unflattering hue.
Many young Africans don’t know that the Arab slave trade spanned some 1,270 years (650 AD–1920s), thrice the duration of the transatlantic slave trade (1526–1870), which they do study. In Brazil, about 55 percent of the population has African roots. In the US, 14 percent descend from enslaved Africans.
Yet in the Arab world, the figure averages a mere 5 percent—just 1 percent in Yemen—despite a slavery era three times longer. Why? The brutal castration of African men, with 80–90 percent dying, severed paternal lines, leaving only maternal traces via African concubines. Slavery lingered late in the Middle East, too. Morocco abolished it in 1922. Saudi Arabia waited until 1962.
Even from a cold, calculating geopolitical angle, you’d expect MBS to spearhead Middle Eastern leaders—especially those with sub-imperialist designs—in stamping out modern slavery and burying the Arab Slave 2.0 narrative. They each wield the autocratic clout to halt these abuses with one edict.
Charles Onyango-Obbo
Ear to the Ground
