The Parliamentary Committee on Women Affairs and Gender has urged government to develop a national strategy to fight human trafficking, taking a leaf from countries like Hungary, which have stringent anti-trafficking laws.
BY VENERANDA LANGA
In a report tabled in Parliament recently, the committee proposed that the strategy should include setting up of safe houses and toll-free hotline numbers, as well as compensation for trafficking victims.
The committee claimed more than 1 000 women were still holed up in Kuwait, suffering in slavery which included sexual exploitation, ill treatment and long working hours without pay. Only 53 women have since been returned to Zimbabwe after businessman Wicknell Chivayo and Young Women Christian Association’s Nyaradzai Gumbonzvanda footed the bills for their repatriation.
“As a country, we need to develop a national strategy to fight human trafficking,” the committee report read. “For example, Hungary has a national strategy to fight trafficking and they have established safe houses for victims, State compensation for victims, training of officers to deal with victims and a hotline toll-free number.”
The committee said if Zimbabwe had a toll-free hotline it was going to be easy to know that some women were stranded in Kuwait and other countries.
Chairperson of the committee Biata Nyamupinga named some of the Zimbabwean women living in Kuwait and allegedly involved in trafficking people to that country.
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“The likes of Hazel Muchaneta and Lorraine Nhapata, who are running an employment agency in Kuwait, must be repatriated home or else surrender their citizenship and say they are no longer Zimbabweans.
“As much as the Home Affairs ministry is going to deal with the local employment agents trafficking people, we still have other employment agents that have surfaced also in Kuwait. We are saying these employment agents should be rounded up,” Nyamupinga said.
Other recommendations by the committee to deal with the scourge of human trafficking were that the Home Affairs and Foreign Affairs ministries must urgently conduct awareness programmes on human trafficking and educate the unsuspecting public, especially the youth, about it.
“There must be political will, and there is need to partner with the public and private sector to create employment opportunities to avert human trafficking,” the committee said.
