When the flapping of butterfly wings turns maids into revolutionaries – Part 1

A butterfly flapped its wings in a small article in this publication a few days ago. The story revealed that Saudi Arabia, the leading destination for Ugandan casual workers, had cut the maximum pay for such workers by Shs1.2 million per month.

At Shs8.4m per month, the new pay ceiling for maids in Saudi Arabia is still higher than what many white-collar managers earn in Uganda. That figure, however, only offered a glimpse into the wild margins enjoyed by labour-exporting companies which, by some educated estimates, is around 75 percent or higher.

READ: Who is benefiting from maids export?

The real story here – the tsunami at the end of the flapping butterfly wings – is in the beginning of the end of the biggest social-economic revolution across many sub-Saharan African countries over the past decade. The export of labour from Africa is not new. An estimated 12 million were shipped off the continent to the Americas in the transatlantic slave trade between 1500 and the 1800s. A smaller but equally significant number ended up in Europe, the Middle East and the Maghreb over the years.

This flood ended but a small seasonal stream continued in the post-colonial period, driven by a combination of political instability and economic adventurism. The end of many intractable political conflicts across the continent in the two decades after the end of the Cold War allowed many exiled Africans to return home.

This appears to have changed around the global economic crisis of 2008 where winner-takes-all economic models and the overnight disappearance of social safety nets led to political instability best captured by the Arab Spring. That an ‘African Winter’ did not follow soon after was not because this economic pain was absent; it had more to do with demographics, urbanisation, social heterogeneity and proactive counter-revolutionary measures hastily pressed into action.

In Uganda, the green shoots of revolution appeared after the 2011 general elections in the form of the Walk-to-Work protests. These were nipped in the bud through the militarisation of law-and-order enforcement, intrusive surveillance and sabotage operations against political opponents and activists, the literal and metaphorical closing of public spaces, infiltration and capture of mainstream media, and the defenestration of civil society.

Yet while anti-riot police were able to beat political opponents and activists out of the streets, teargas and rubber bullets could not cure the underlying economic crisis of stagnant real economic growth and unemployment. By 2019 there were more Ugandan households living in poverty than there had been in 2015, according to official government data. Labour export, primarily into the Middle East, provided an escape valve to this pressure cooker of discontent and turned down the heat on the boiling pot of resentment. The actual number is hard to pin down, but macro data offer revealing insights. In 2013, total arrivals into the country were around 1.7 million, three percent higher than the year before. Departures, at 1.6 million were lower, but had risen faster, by 6.5 percent from the previous year. This trend continued until 2016 when departures overtook arrivals – the former having grown by ten percent year-on-year – and continued into subsequent years until the disruption of the coronavirus pandemic.

These numbers carry an important proviso: they count the number of trips made, rather than actual net movement of persons. They also don’t show, at least at face value, whether foreigners are leaving while Ugandans are coming in, or vice versa. Nevertheless, if there are more outward than inward journeys, you don’t need a PhD in statistics to understand the direction of travel.

Two additional data points help us narrow down the ‘who’ and ‘where-to’. First is public data that show revenues of Shs42 billion in passport applications in 2021 alone. This was swollen by those whose passports had expired during the pandemic but many of these more than 100,000 applications, the data show, were from first-time applicants.

The second data point, also from official sources, is more illuminating. In 2018 about 12,000 Ugandans were recorded as having left the country for the Middle East. By 2022 that number had risen tenfold to 120,000. This, curiously or coincidentally, is about the same number of pupils who enter primary one in the universal primary education scheme but fall through the cracks before the primary leaving examinations.

Fifteen years ago this publication reported that while 400,000 school leavers joined the job market every year, in one year only about 7,000 formal jobs had been publicly advertised. It noted that even if each advertised job obscured another nine, the economy was producing less than a quarter of the required jobs. We can now see that the reason we do not have angry mobs of young people marching for jobs in the streets is, in large part, because they are not here. They are in the Middle East and elsewhere, eking out a living, and making a killing for the labour exporters.

IYCMI: Maid in Middle East: ‘Hard work couldn’t save my brother’ 

My life as a migrant worker in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia’s recent decision might be a passing cloud. But it is the nature of free markets that some other country was always going to step up and provide raw labour at a lower price. Experience and training give current job holders an advantage over cheaper new arrivals. And it will be many years before the income earned abroad drops to levels where it makes more sense to return home. But as we shall see next week, when that day comes – and eventually it will – it will bring a political revolution with it.

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and  poor man’s freedom fighter. 
[email protected]; @Kalinaki