HON. NYAMUPINGA: Exploitation again was on forced labour. The girls had to work from 4am to 2am. How do you work like that? How do you work for so many hours only having a break of two hours? Who knows what was happening on the break. The labour we are talking about from 4am to 2am was cleaning the house and doing all the maid chores but these two hours were also used for different chores as well. The lady of the house would go to work and ask the maid – there was no job description Mr. Speaker Sir, the girls did not know what exactly they were supposed to do. On the right hand they were maids they had to clean the house but on the left hand they were mistresses. When the lady of the house goes away, she would tell the maid that when daddy asks for anything do it for him. How do we have even women collaborating with their husbands to abuse other women?
Physical and mental torture induced on these ladies is unspeakable. If you have watched on television since this issue of girls is very topical in this country at the moment, I think it was last week when they were being interviewed and you heard that they were actually not being given food. They would only eat the food that was left by the family they were working for. Sometimes they would even go for days without food. Some would even end up taking food from the dustbins and eating but they were still expected to do their work.
It is important that sometimes because of the time bomb in this country of unemployment, it is difficult to talk about eradicating human trafficking even to Kuwait where we have had these horrific experiences, you will still find others who will still brave themselves to say they will go back to Kuwait because they are not employed. If we are not going to deal with the issue of unemployment, we are not going to nip the issue of human trafficking in the bud. We are dealing with symptoms here because even if we are going to ask any department to take awareness to the village level, or to whoever, they are going to ask them, if I do not do this, what is the alternative. I think the Government must come up with an alternative if we have to eradicate human trafficking.
The girls are not only being trafficked to Kuwait but also to China and Cape Town where we had a clip some months ago that went viral on the social media of our ladies who were being asked to eat what they have never wanted to eat but they had to do it because they wanted to survive. Do we want to reduce our women to that level? If we have respect for our women, I think we have to come up with a plan that will make them not want to go to these so called greener pastures.
Thousands of women and children are being trafficked internationally and even here in Zimbabwe, far away from Kuwait. In this country, there is a lot of human trafficking. You find sometimes girls are confined somewhere, being trained as sisters of a church and they are kept in that room for months. They are not allowed to go out. Who knows what goes in there? A lot of sexual abuse is happening. When I read about this, it only confirmed what I used to hear – what was quoted in The Sunday Mail of 15 May 2016, where this church called Apostolic Sect would bar girls from going to school because once they go to school, they would be enlightened. They have to remain unschooled so that they are trained as sisters. During training, there is a lot of abuse and also sexual abuse is happening.
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