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29-year-old Ugandan maid flees from Oman
Sumaiya Nannyanzi, 29, is a maid based in Oman and in an extensive interview carried in the Daily Monitor last week; she revealed how she was being tortured by her employers to the extent of being denied food.
However, given the condition under which she has been living, Nannyanzi fled her employer’s home in Weleiyh-Boucher, Muscat and sought refuge at the Kenyan embassy in the capital.
In a phone interview last weekend, Nannyanzi told Daily Monitor she had sneaked out of her employer’s home last Saturday after months without payment.
She narrated how the conditions at her place of employment, which included physical torture, were no longer favourable for her to stay.
“The following day [after Daily Monitor had carried her story] a neighbour warned me and advised me to flee for my life. She [claimed] three maids from Africa had recently died in Muscat under mysterious circumstances,” she told Daily Monitor.
She said she was driven by the same neighbour to the Kenyan embassy in Muscat where she was still stranded by last Saturday.
Daily Monitor could not independently verify the claims as calls to various embassy lines went unanswered. Uganda has no embassy in Oman, which could explain why Nannyanzi chose to seek refuge in the Kenyan Embassy.
A number of Ugandans, according to Nannyanzi are stuck in Oman with no means of returning home.
On August 8, 2016 Daily Monitor carried a story in which Nannyanzi claimed she was being mistreated by her employers and requested the Ugandan government to help her return home.
However, it was still unclear if the government would intervene in the matter since some officials in government have time-and-again said they are reluctant to deal with individual cases, especially those who have been smuggled into Middle East countries.
Recently, there were media reports that claimed a 24-year-old Ugandan maid in Dubai had died mysteriously with her employers claiming she had fallen from their flat’s balcony, before, succumbing to excessive bleeding.
Earlier this week, Annet Kirabira, the executive director of Rahab Uganda, an organisation that reports cases of human trafficking, said she had through different interactions learnt of a number of maids that are mistreated in Arab countries but are stuck because they have no money to return home.
She said many of them were now distressed and want to return home.
In July, The Times of Oman ran a story that quoted the Ethiopian Airlines country manager, Sami Muctar as saying that there had been an increased influx of Ugandan maids into Oman with many flights carrying between 15 and 25 young women into Muscat on every flight out of Kampala to Oman.
