Together, we can end modern-day slavery

Are there Kenyans who sell off their fellow Kenyans to make money? Put differently, are there adult Kenyans who consciously purpose to trade fellow Kenyans in order to earn a living? Unfortunately, yes!

Slave trade ended about 100 years ago, or so we think. It was the bad people in Europe, USA, India and even Latin America who criss-crossed Africa to capture young men and women to go and sell them for cheap labour.

Well, several treaties abolished slave trade. The dignity of the human beings regardless of colour, territory or income was restored.

The bad people are no more, one would assume. That, sadly, is not the case.

We haven’t moved much from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when human beings sold off others. It is 2019 and we are still talking about capture, sale and enslavement of Kenyans by Kenyans in the black market.

It was revealed at a conference organised this week in Nairobi by Santa Marta Group, which brought together the State and the Church to deliberate ways of “sensitising the local communities on the dangers of human trafficking”, that Kenya is a source, transit and destination for trafficked persons.

Santa Marta Group is an international group comprising police chiefs, the Vatican and civil society organisations to purposely fight against human trafficking in countries like ours.

Some of the documents discussed at the conference show that both the Government and the Church are making progress towards eradicating human trafficking and modern day slavery.

"The Government of Kenya has positively taken numerous actions that indicate some noteworthy commitment in fighting human trafficking.

45 agencies

For example, the Government directed all agencies linking persons to employment opportunities abroad to register with the Foreign Affairs Ministry.

"However, by 2018 only 45 agencies, out of the estimated hundreds of recruitment agencies for labour abroad, had registered with the Foreign Affairs Ministry.

In 2010 the Government enacted the Counter Trafficking in Persons Act (2010) which criminalised sex and labour trafficking.

The Act endorses a punishment of no less than 30 years imprisonment or a fine of not less than Sh30 million for persons convicted of an offence of trafficking in human persons," said one of the documents.

That is good news. But the bad news still lingers; some Kenyans working in cahoots with cartels still find it appropriate to traffic human beings.

A report by the National Crime Research Centre in 2015 noted that trafficking of persons from Kenya to other nations was the most prevalent (external trafficking) at 60.2 per cent.

Protection Act

Trafficking for labour was the most prevalent type of trafficking (58.7 per cent) followed by child trafficking (24.1 per cent) and trafficking for prostitution (17.1 per cent). It is unlikely latest figures will be better.

In its 2018 Trafficking in Persons Report, the US Department of State retained Kenya in Tier 2 for not fully meeting the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking.

Generally, countries in T2 are those whose governments do not fully meet the Trafficking Victims’ Protection Act's minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards.

Although Kenyans from all over the country are victims of this modern-day enslavement in the form of human trafficking, people at the Coast suffer most.

The 2018 International Organisation for Migration assessment report on the human situation in the coastal region noted that the region is a hotspot for human trafficking.

The report added that there is little data available and there is a lack of programming targeting trafficking in human persons in the region.

Due to the high levels of poverty in the country, young people, including boys and girls, are lured to the Coast where they are captured by black market merchants and sold off to some hotels and brothels as sex slaves.

Some are exposed to servitude by wealthy people who do not care about human dignity.

With unemployment rates soaring, parents spending less time with their children due to social pressures to earn a living, people losing their conscience due to love of money, corruption dampening the lives of poor families and the country lacking visionary leaders to inspire the young generation, human trafficking can only get worse.

All of us have a duty to support the Government and the Church to fight modern-day slavery.

 

Dr Mokua comments on social justice issues