The issue of the trafficking of Zimbabwean women to Kuwait spilled over into Parliament on Tuesday with Buhera South MP Joseph Chinotimba demanding that the Middle East country be penalised for allowing its citizens to enslave over 200 stranded local women.
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Midlands Senator Lillian Timveos also called for the enactment of legislation to deal with bogus employment agencies luring Zimbabwean women with dubious job offers only to introduce them into sex slavery.
Thirty-two of the over 200 women trafficked to Kuwait returned home on Saturday after escaping from their captors and one of them is reportedly pregnant from the sexual abuse.
A former Kuwaiti Ambassador to Zimbabwe and another embassy official have been implicated in the scam in which hundreds of Zimbabwean women were being trafficked to the Middle East country after being promied lucrative jobs.
While the Kuwaiti government should be held accountable for the part its officials played in facilitating the crimes and for failing to prevent the trafficking of the women, the Zimbabwean government is more culpable for the heinous wrongdoings.
Thus, while the suggestions by local MPs to introduce strict legislation or financially penalise Kuwait were noble, these alone will not end the trafficking of Zimbabwean women as we believe more needs to be done, especially by government in protecting its people.
The sad story of how young women were ill-treated in Kuwait exposes how government has failed to protect its people as enshrined in the Constitution. None of the helpless women desired to be stranded and enslaved in a foreign land.
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They all wished to be with their families and help in the development of Zimbabwe.
But because there are no jobs to talk about and industry is collapsing due to the worsening economic crisis, out of desperation, many citizens are falling prey to such scams. If the government is serious about its people, it should be concerned about this.
The critical question which President Robert Mugabe and his government must ask themselves is: Why are people skipping this country in droves? At its economic peak, Zimbabwe had over 2 million workers. Yet, today less than 500 000 are still formally employed while over 2 million, including university graduates, have become vendors or are doing one odd job or another in the informal sector.
It is high time the Zanu PF government starts delivering on its promised 2,2 million jobs, otherwise more citizens will fall prey to human traffickers and other criminals. Zanu PF must stop its internal succession fights and work on reviving the collapsing industries in order to revive the economy.
The government must work on attracting foreign direct investment and put to a stop all self-destructive policies, in particular the indigenisation policy which has forced many would-be investors to sit on the fence for fear of dropping their cash into a bottomless pit that Zimbabwe has become.
Zimbabwe’s economy used to be agro-based, but most of the farms are now derelict after they were allocated to undeserving Zanu PF supporters. The government must be bold enough and repossess under-utilised farms and re-allocate them to productive farmers.
Unless the government gets the economy running again and creates jobs for its people, our people will continue to fall prey to human traffickers and other vices as they desperately scrounge for a living.
