How to ‘eat' our children: Call them labour, send them abroad

If they showed you a video of a cannibal eating a human being you would probably turn away in disgust. So what would you do if I proved to you that you are no better than a cannibal feeding on your children? Well, we the region's older generation — those of us in ministries, parliaments and budget committees, from Kampala through Nairobi to Dodoma — have built a system that profits from the desperation of the young and then abandon them to pay with their very lives. We license the agencies that send them abroad, collect the fees, and when they vanish into a trafficking network in Bangkok, or an abusive household in the Gulf, we utter statements of concern. The story of three Ugandans— Amon Kisaakye, David Musajja and Samuel Kusiima, who travelled to Thailand through a recruitment agency to avoid unemployment and then went silent is neither unique nor unusual. Parliament was told, in the last week of August, that government did not know where they were. Kenya's National Employment Authority is now deregistering recruitment agencies by the dozen for defrauding job-seekers, even as the Labour ministry in September 2024 set a target of deploying five to ten thousand youth a week to the Gulf. Ministers across the EAC keep signing communiqués pledging to harmonise labour migration laws while the region ships out millions of our youth for billions in remittances. Almost nowhere has the money followed the workers. But Uganda got here first. Since 2005 it has run one of the EAC's most formalised state systems for sending workers abroad — an advantage that instead proves what happens when a country builds the machinery to export labour without building the machinery to protect the people moving through it. Uganda, with two decades' head start, still has only three labour attachés covering half a million workers in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE combined. With all the ICT capabilities, we haven't funded the migrant-worker database promised to parliament, young persons disappear untraced. That negligence is a warning to Kenya, Tanzania and the rest of the bloc, who risk copying the formalisation without the protection. What should trouble every taxpayer as much as the trafficking itself is that the money to fix this already exists. The Labour ministry's unit that licenses recruitment agencies generates some Ush30 billion a year from licensing, application and job-order fees. Under the Public Finance Management Act, that money flows straight into the Consolidated Fund; the ministry then competes for its own budget like everyone else. What comes back to the externalisation programme itself is just about Ush2 billion. The finance ministry admitted to MPs on the Gender Committee that it is not short of revenue, and underfunding directly causes the ministry's failure to resolve migrant worker complaints. Only six percent of money the government reaps directly from the sweat (and sometimes unfortunately the blood) of our young human exports is allocated to their safety! The rest of the region shouldn't copy it. The government can better invest a decent portion of the poor kids' Ush30 billion into their safety — funding attachés in the Gulf and Southeast Asia, an active migrant-worker database, and a larger portion into giving young Ugandans a reason to stay home while earning. Here is the maths: Ush30 billion a year is Ush2.5 billion a month. A handsome half a million shillings salary a month (which is about twice the GDP/capita), can directly employs 5,000 young Ugandans indefinitely in labour-intensive work like manually grading feeder roads district by district — needing no imported machinery. The process would open village farmers to markets and cut the transport costs stranding their harvests. Even if we paid the monthly Ush2.5billion to 5,000 youth to dig holes and filling them, it would dissuade them from seeking migration for the life-threatening jobs and give them income to spend in the Ugandan economy – stimulating further employment. None of this needs new taxes. What the Labour ministry wants is what the National Bureau of Standards is already asking Parliament for — authority to retain the revenue it generates, instead of watching it vanish into the Consolidated Fund.