Ugandan officials are repatriating about 24 women working as domestic staff in Saudi Arabia after complaints about abuse.
The spokesman of the Ugandan Embassy in Saudi Arabia said on Friday in Riyadh that the abuse has prompted a ban on sending Ugandans as housemaids to the country.
He said seven women have returned to Uganda so far this week, after an interview that left their employers complaining about abuse, mistreatment and moved into Saudi detention centres waiting to go home.
Sheikh Rashid Ssemuddu, the Ugandan Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, said the women were staying at a shelter operated by the Saudi Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs.
He said the ban imposed by the Ugandan government on sending housemaids to Saudi Arabia after a barrage of complaints about workers being treated inhumanely, would would remain until working conditions were “deemed fitting”.
Ssemuddu said about 24 Ugandan women were at the shelter.
He said some of them need paperwork and airline tickets after complaining they had been held as slaves and their passports taken away.
He said: “”We are in daily contact with them and efforts are underway to have the rest of the women returned home in the coming few days.”
The ambassador said this was the second time that Uganda had banned the movement of domestic staff to Saudia Arabia after a similar move in 2014.
He, however, said the embassy had received word from the Saudi Ministry of Labour, calling for a meeting to discuss the bilateral agreement between the two countries.
Ssemuddu said: “Our people should remain calm because we have known all the problems and their sources and we are going to deal with them.”
The two nations signed a five-year deal last July allowing college graduates to seek jobs as domestic workers and in other fields as a way of addressing high unemployment among young people in Uganda.
The Uganda’s Labour Minister, Muruli Mukasa, explained that the agreement was intended to protect the rights and welfare of immigrant workers by setting a minimum wage and stopping labour companies from taking money off applicants’ salaries.
Rehema Babirye, one of the women who returned this week, said she was deceived by a local recruitment company who promised her a job in sales in Saudi Arabia.
Babirye said the moment she arrived, she was taken to work as a maid with no days off.
“When I protested and said I wanted to return back to my country I was instead arrested,” she said.
An unnamed government official said recruitment of workers to travel to Gulf States is a big business in Uganda.
He said many recruitment companies required candidates to pay for an airline ticket and visa costing thousands of dollars even though every legislative mandate in the Gulf requires the employer to bear the costs of recruitment.
He said many of them complain that they are held as slaves.
Meanwhile, the Australia-based anti-slavery campaign group, Walk Free, estimates about 36 million people are trapped in modern-day slavery around the world.
Reuters/NAN.
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