RIGHTS: Don’t Worry About Hostage Taking, Kenyans Still Love Middle East

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Joyce Mulama

NAIROBI, Jul 27 2004 (IPS) - Poverty has often played the leading role in driving Kenyans to look for employment in the Middle East. But last week’s kidnapping of three Kenyans by Iraqi militants is set to change all that, if government has its way.

The government of President Mwai Kibaki has urged Kenyans working in the Middle East to return home but that will mean coming to swell the number of people looking for jobs.

Kenyan expatriates in Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are being forced to weigh the scale between their security and a condition of deprivation at home. The choices are not easy.

“The number of unemployed (people in Kenya) stands at over two million, or 14.6 percent, of (the country’s) labour force, with the youth accounting for 45 percent of the total,’’ according to the ministry of planning and national development.

Kenya’s 1.8 percent annual economic growth rate can hardly generate employment to meet the growing demand.

The decision to recall the expatriates followed the capture of three Kenyans by Iraqi militants on Jul. 22. The hostages, Faiz Hamis, Jalal Awadh and Ibrahim Hamis, together with their three Indian colleagues, were seized by an Islamic group in Iraq last week.

The captors have threatened to behead the hostages, all truck drivers, if the company they are working for – the Kuwait Gulf Link Transport Company – does not withdraw from Iraq immediately. About 100 Kenyans are reportedly working for the firm.

Initially, the captors, calling themselves Black Banners Brigade, had threatened to behead the hostages one by one if their employer ignored orders to pull out of Iraq. But on Jul 26, the captors extended the deadline indefinitely. The extension allowed room for further negotiations to save the hostages’ lives.

Without wasting time, the government despatched a delegation to Kuwait to negotiate the release of the hostages. Speaking from Zambia on Jul. 26, Kenya’s foreign affairs minister Chirau Ali Mwakwere confirmed that the government had sent two diplomats from its embassy in Saudi Arabia to neighbouring Kuwait to secure the release of the three men.

The move seems to have been prompted by passionate appeals by families of the hostages who begged the captors to set free their loved ones. They said the men had gone to Iraq to look for work.

The seizure of the three men has raised questions and brought to scrutiny the government’s election pledge to create jobs for Kenyans. When President Kibaki’s government came to power in Dec. 2002, it did so, on a platform of creating 500,000 jobs every year, translating into 2.5 million jobs by the end of its five-year term (2007).

Instead, Kenyans have experienced increasing job losses caused by a weak economy and donors’ threat to withhold funding.

Last week, the European Union, the country’s second largest donor after the World Bank, deferred its funding of 59 million dollars in budget support due to high level corruption within government.

Official statistics show that 56 percent of Kenyans are living below the poverty line of less than a dollar a day, up from 55.4 percent in 2001 and 48.8 percent in 1990.

Rubea Saris, director of Al Khaleej Agency, a Kenyan firm that sought jobs for the three men, says truck drivers earn about 354 dollars per month, exclusive of allowances, in the Middle East.

“If you add transport allowance and overtime charges, the figure comes to about 80,000 shillings (1012 dollars) per month, a package that has lured many Kenyans without jobs,” Saris told IPS in a telephone interview from his base in the Indian Ocean port city of Mombasa, some 500 kilometres from the capital Nairobi.

Samira Ahmed, the wife of one of the hostages, Jalal Awadh, told IPS, “My husband went to Kuwait in August last year because he did not have a stable job. Since then, he has been sending me between 15,000 and 20,000 shillings (about 190 and 253 dollars) every two months for family upkeep.”

“I am a housewife and we depend solely on my husband. I am praying to God to release him and the rest of his colleagues so that we can go on with our lives,” said the mother of two, sobbing.

According to Saris, more Kenyans are applying for jobs in the Gulf in the face of the abductions. In the past two weeks alone, he has sent 150 of them to Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates as bus drivers.

“As long as unemployment continues to bite, more Kenyans will continue seeking job opportunities abroad,” he stated.

Economists have urged the government to create an enabling environment for job creation. Such an environment, they say requires first and foremost maximum security to lure foreign investors.

But the prevailing state of insecurity in Kenya is driving potential investors away.

At an investment conference held in Nairobi in March, Japanese Ambassador to Kenya Makoto Asami told IPS that Japanese firms were transferring their businesses from Kenya to South Africa due to insecurity.

“We are tired of doing business here because of the insecurity and are looking for new markets elsewhere in the region,” he said.

Crime has been on the rise particularly in Nairobi, caused by the rising army of unemployed youth. Nairobi used to be a city for evening strollers. It has lost that image.