The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | The Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development has said that the 100 million Shillings given to it by private external labour recruitment firms as a bank guarantee is not for repatriating the remains of migrant workers.
It follows a proposal by the Speaker of Parliament Anita Among, that the Labour ministry should consider charging part of the 100 million Shillings bank guarantee committed by the external recruitment agencies to meet expenses related to the repatriation of bodies of migrant workers who die in the line of duty in the Middle East.
Speaker Among was responding to a matter raised by Aidah Nantaba, the Kayunga District Woman Representative after one of her constituents, Lydia Ayila died in Saudi Arabia in November 2022. Nantaba said that the Saudi Government demanded a fee of USD 3,400 (12.7 million Shillings) to repatriate her body or be buried there.
Ayila’s family could not afford the cost prompting the Labour Ministry to pay Saudi USD 1,000 (3.7 million Shillings), which was insufficient. The deceased’s mother, led by Nantaba, approached Among who contributed USD 2,400 (9 million Shillings) balance to meet the expenses of repatriating the body.
Martin Wandera, the Director of Labour, Employment and Occupational Safety and Health at the Ministry in an interview said that the bank guarantee is specifically meant to settle claims raised by migrant workers against external recruitment companies for breach of contract terms.
Asked why the remains of the migrant workers take long to be repatriated from the Middle East, Wandera explained that the delay which usually ranges between 7 to 21 days is a ‘necessary administrative procedure’ to allow for thorough investigations on the cause of worker’s death following disruptions occasioned by the global Covid-19 pandemic.
Ayila’s death was the latest after dozens of similar cases that include; Shadia Najjuko, Milly Namazi, Sharifa Birungi, and Salima Babirye, were reported especially in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia which has a Bilateral Labour Agreement – BLA and Memorandum of Understanding-MoU with Uganda until December 2022.
The BLA and MoU bestow the responsibility of repatriating a dead body to the external recruitment agency which has grossly been violated by foreign recruitment firms. The Ugandan Human Rights Commission-UHRC report of 2021 revealed that 28 migrant workers, three of whom were males, died in the Middle East.
Between August 2019 and to date, records available at the Overseas Workers Voice Uganda, an anti-human trafficking non-governmental organization led by Mwiza Mariam, the Chief Executive Officer of the advocacy group showed 54 bodies of migrant workers were repatriated with each costing between 20 to 30 million Shillings or even more.
The government has signed BLA with the United Arab Emirates – UAE and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with the latter being the most preferred destination for most Ugandan migrant workers with up to 75,873 out of 84,879 externalized in 2021.
The government’s estimated annual remittances from the migrant workers in the Gulf countries of Qatar, Iraq, Bahrain, Jordan, Afghanistan and Kuwait and other destinations that include Somalia and Poland among others stand approximately at US $ 900 million, about 3.365 trillion Shillings.
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