Museveni talk on labour sector is all hot air

Labour Day celebrations are mainly for those that offer their labour to employers. It’s a day that is set aside to celebrate the advancement of their rights as employees. But this is not the case for Uganda. 

Majority of our employed people only work to get a meal. I have known the pain of being unemployed and basing on my experience, anyone who jokes about employment/underemployment issues should be treated as an enemy.

Presiding over Labour Day celebrations, Mr Museveni in his usual style mocked the youth when he claimed that under his guidance and ‘visionary’ leadership, we could create 70 million jobs. According to his assertion, we would have a surplus of close to 50 million jobs since according to the labour laws only a half of our population has attained employable age. As he said this, he was oblivious to the fact that the Ministry of Internal Affairs is under pressure from our young citizens who are seeking travel documents so they can travel to the Middle East and be enslaved.

The enslavement starts at Entebbe airport where mostly young women are forced to dress in a way they have never dressed before to meet the requirements of their new slave masters. Those who gain from this modern slavery use flowery language and prefer to call it labour export.

The mockery went on when he claimed that his government wasn’t in support of labour export, yet to the contrary the ministry of Labour has issued more than 200 labour exporting licences. This is because, torturous as it is, the annual remittances from this slave labour are about $700m (Shs2.5 trillion) which is approximately 5.5 per cent of the National Budget and provides for the much-needed forex exchange that the Central Bank constantly uses to stabilise the otherwise weakening Shilling.

Knowing how corrupt his system is, and that the licensed labour export agencies are owned by high-profile government and security officials, Mr Museveni’s downplay of this trade was meant to divert Ugandans from the evils involved, where the victims are subjected to non-payment, forced deduction of wages, confiscation of identity documents, restricted movement, unsafe living conditions, long hours of work without rest, isolation, verbal and physical abuse, including sexual abuse.

Continuing to qualify his energy towards his ‘hate’ for labour export, he compared 2021 and 1986 again, claiming that today an estimated 700,000 Ugandans are employed in the mushrooming industries and that in 1986 we just had 30,000 Ugandans working in industries.

His quotations from 1986 are many times misguided, he always forgets to tell Ugandans that Uganda had approximately 15 million people and that today we are close 45 million. In 1986, it was Ugandans and government that owned factories and industries and worked as engineers, managers, directors, accountants etc. 

Actually, 1986 became the end of our local industries as his government through the sham privatisation process sold off most of the industries for a song, handing them to mostly Asian ‘investors’. It shouldn’t surprise anyone, therefore, that in 2021 Ugandans have been reduced to working as casual labourers under numerous forms of labour abuse, and yet are paid peanuts.

The 35-year-long Museveni regime has instead exposed us to exploitation at the hands of regime-backed Asian capitalists, leaving up to three generations of our citizenry in perpetual enslavement both home and away. 

In Uganda, the Asian capitalists subject our generation to harsh work conditions and do the same when our young people go to countries for employment.

We are abused home and away. Therefore, the fight to get freedom from all sorts of discrimination should continue because it’s only this fight that will give us labour rights!

The writer is KCCA Deputy Lord Mayor     

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