Prime
Ugandan maids in Middle East are Kampala’s ‘magic pill’
Mr Charles Onyango-Obbo
What you need to know:
- In a good Uganda, these young people would be snapped up as soon as they leave schools and universities, and paid at least $1,000 a month.
Middle-aged folks in Kampala who are into radical African things will remember the Nigerian Pan-African scholar and activist Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem.
Taju, as we called him, had the energy that could light a small town, and was as outspoken, and radical as anyone could be. He was part of the lively pan-African community in Kampala in the late 1980s and 1990s and famously was General Secretary of the Seventh Pan-African Congress, which was held in Kampala in 1994.
Taju later became the director of Justice Africa, Deputy Director of the United Nations Millennium Campaign for Africa, based in Nairobi. He died in a car crash on May 25, 2009, as he sped to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport to catch an early morning flight.
Monitor’s headline, “Over 120,000 workers left Uganda in search of jobs in just two years”, would have driven Taju bananas. The scenes and stories of Africans forced by desperate economic conditions at home to go back to “coloniser” and “oppressor” countries to do menial work in dehumanising conditions used to upset him.
One time at a conference in Nairobi, he railed about the “African tragedy…[where] if you docked a ship at any African port and called on people to go and work for peanuts, you will get more people voluntarily queuing than were taken away from Africa during the Slave Trade.”
The appalling conditions these Ugandans (and other Africans) face, including torture to death especially in the Middle East, were dramatically exposed in the recent LabourExportExhibitionUG campaign on social media. None of that will have discouraged them from getting on the labour export treadmill, because the alternative is worse.
Before the Covid pandemic turned the world upside down at the start of 2020, Daily Monitor reported that “At least nine in every 10 Ugandans who have completed any form of education are unemployed. According to the National Planning Authority (NPA) statistics released in 2017, 700,000 people join the [Uganda] job market every year regardless of qualification, but only 90,000 get something to do. This translates to 87 percent of people ready to work but can’t find a job.”
With the knock-on effects of Covid, the situation is worse today. Not taking a gamble on a job on a construction site in Qatar or a cruel Saudi’s household for $500 a month, leaves you the option of starvation, working on a Ugandan construction site for $50, or a cruel household in Kampala, Mbarara, Mbale, or Lira for $5 – or nothing. It’s a no-brainer which option young jobless Ugandans will choose.
These Ugandans with their small jobs in the Middle East and Gulf, have saved the country’s neck big time. They contributed a large part of the US$1.4 billion in remittances in the financial year 2022/23. The remittances are almost tied with the earnings from tourism.
In a good Uganda, these young people would be snapped up as soon as they leave schools and universities, and paid at least $1,000 a month. For a thousand reasons, Uganda is an economic hell for them, instead.
Rarely discussed, is how this export of “slave labour”, as critics call it, is impacting politics at home. All the signs are that it has created incentives to entrench conditions to drive even more of them into desperation to look for work outside the country.
Elsewhere in Africa, what is happening in Uganda was witnessed first during the worst years of Robert Mugabe’s misrule in Zimbabwe. Hundreds of thousands of restless and disaffected Zimbabweans fleeing economic hardship was good for Mugabe and the ruling Zanu-PF because they were often anti-government. Their exodus reduced the pool of opposition, and potential revolutionaries, and lowered political risk to the regime. And these politically problematic people then propped up the government that had driven them out, by sending back hundreds of millions of dollars in remittances, giving Mugabe and his cronies a bailout.
The exodus to the Middle first took away Kizza Besigye’s urban foot soldiers in his days as FDC warriors against the Museveni government and weakened them. Recent exits have swallowed portions of Bobi Wine’s urban “People Power” brigades.
Ever shrewd, simultaneously the Kampala government has slashed allocations to teaching the Arts and Social Sciences, thus cutting back on funding to studies that lead to critical thinking and, potentially, anti-government ideas (equality, economic justice, and inspiring revolutionary ideas from history).
At the same time, funding for education overall is in a horrible state. This is likely deliberate. First, why spend $20,000 to educate someone over their school lifetime who will earn back only $6,000 at best? But most importantly, why spend $20,000 educating a Ugandan who will become so good, get a scholarship to Harvard, a job at the Brookings Institution, and who’ll return thinking he is cleverer than the president, and can do his job better – even if he sends home more money than 100 Ugandan house helps in the United Arab Emirates combined?
Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist,
writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3
