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| The deceased, 23-year old Faustina Tay. Photo Credit: Aljazeera |
“Umuofia kwenu,” yelled Ogbuefi Ezuego
the powerful orator in Chinua Achebe’s legendary novel Things Fall Apart. It was the fifth time the old man had bellowed
and the crowd that had gathered at the market-place thunderously responded ‘Yaa!’
The
crowd of men, numbering in their thousands, had gathered after they had heard
at dawn the gong of the town-crier resounding. The message was simple. That,
they ought to meet immediately after the sun had smiled away the grim looks of
the dawn.
“Those
sons [referring to the people of Mbaino—
a nearby community] of wild animals have dared to murder a daughter of Umuofia,” said Ezuego to the teeming
crowd.
Chinua
Achebe says in that fictionary tale that Ezuego “threw his head down and
gnashed his teeth, and allowed a murmur of suppressed anger to sweep the crowd.
When he began again, the anger on his face was gone and in its place a sort of
smile hovered, more terrible and more sinister than the anger.”
When
Ogbuefi Ezuego was done telling the men gathered that their daughter had been
gruesomely murdered by miscreants in Mbaino, the men longed for blood as though
water to quench their thirst.
So
was how the literary wizard captured the confrontation between Umuofia and
Mbaino. But, could same be said of the response by Ghana when Aljazeera reported on April 7, 2020,
that its daughter— 23-year-old Faustina Tay— had been ‘found dead’ at the
basement of the apartment she lived in and served as a maid in Lebanon?
A
mysterious death it was!
The
said story dubbed “The desperate final days of a domestic worker in Lebanon”
says, Ms. Tay had sent Canada-based activist group, This Is Lebanon, messages of the abuse she suffered in the house.
Considering
the horrific nature of her death, it should have been enough trigger to spark
an uproar in the camp of the cult of human rights groups in Ghana if not among
Ghanaians proper. But, hey, there have been an absolute silence on the front of
these human rights activists who would ordinarily make ‘noise’ over trivial
issues.
Well,
perhaps, they are all fighting Covid-19! In Ghana, the news of Faustina Tay’s
death struggled to make headlines as only a handful of media outlets carried it
on their portals. Similarly, very few people posted or commented on it on
social media. It was/is not surprising that the hashtag #JusticeForTay did not fly. Had it been the video of a national
security minister modeling in pyjamas for a supposed ‘side-chick,’ traditional
media, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook would have had an overflow of
commentaries. This is Ghana, a country where we major in the minor and the
reverse is true.
Nonetheless,
no matter how few the people who are adding their voices in seeking justice for
Faustina Tay, the fight for her and many others in Lebanon and other gulf
countries must constantly be echoed.
For
migration expert, MacDonald K.B. Simpson, as far as poverty continues to
torment many in Africa, we will keep hearing and seeing these sort of painful
deaths.
“The
main culprit [here] is poverty and so to speak, drives people to leave home not
at their will. Also, the demand for cheap domestic labour in that part of the
world is another cause. The demand for house helps, baby sitters, cleaners and
so on is in high demand in the Gulf States and Africa is a fertile ground for
such domestic workers,” he said to International
Dialogue in email correspondence.
Mr.
Simpson says that a single mother with very little education in Ghana who is
struggling to make ends meet would be tempted by a ₵1,000 monthly remuneration
plus free accommodation in Kuwait, Qatar or Lebanon and do whatever it takes to
take that offer.
On
Saturday, April 11, 2020, when International
Dialogue spoke to a Ghanaian lady living in Lebanon, she echoed same
sentiments. This lady— who spoke on condition of anonymity— though educated and
enlightened says she could not resist the temptation of being promised [while
in Ghana] a monthly salary of ₵1,000 as a maid in Lebanon.
Barbara
[not her real name] says she is fortunate to have had a couple [her employers]
who somewhat treat her well with the exception that she works 17-19 hours a day
with basically no rest. That, there are hundreds of her fellows in Lebanon who
are experiencing hell at first hand.
“Most
Ghanaian women and other maids here are being severely beaten, intentionally
starved for no apparent reason and sexually molested among others,” she said.
MacDonald
K.B. Simpson says, “Faustina’s death should be blamed not on her employers
alone but the process that sent her there and the poverty she had ran away
from.”
Here,
the current lockdown in parts of Ghana has exposed the deep divide between the
rich and the poor in the West African state. Successive governments have turned
a blind eye on this without creatively thinking to uplift the masses from
hardship. Even if Ghana had state farms, in of its 16 regions, and employed
those Ghanaians who go to serve as maids elsewhere, they would have lived
dignified and meaningful lives.
“On
one of my trips back to Ghana a couple of years ago, I met two young ladies on
a plane who told me they were domestic maids in Erbil, the capital city of
Kurdistan, and that they were going to Ghana for a one month holiday. Kurdistan! I had never thought
Ghanaian women would work there. I was surprised not at the country they were
coming from but the story they had told me,” says MacDonald K.B. Simpson.
The
hard truth is, we really do not value human lives as Ghanaians and so it hardly
crosses our mind to think of how to protect our people abroad. In countries
like America, once you are considered a national your safety to the nation is a
topmost priority.
What
concrete action did we take as a people after Yahya Jammeh and his soldiers
freely killed 44 Ghanaians in 2005?
Somewhere
last year, at the Gambia’s Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission,
Lieutenant Malick Jatta and Corporal Omar A. Jallow said that the Ghanaians were
executed by the “Junglers” squad on the orders of Mr. Jammeh.
A
Ranking Member of Ghana’s Parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs, Samuel
Okudzeto Ablakwa, after the Jallow confession said at the floor of parliament
that government must reopen probe into the gruesome killings. This, we are yet
to know whether the probe has been reopened.
However,
if it is lack of commitment on the part of government, the Ghanaian media
should not be slacking too. Rather, it should be fronting campaigns to get
justice for such slain and abused fellows.
What
the Ghanaian media must know is that it is shameful to report on an issue once
and go to sleep. After the media reported on the killing of investigative
journalist Ahmed Suale, it went to bed only to come back to it on the occasion
of his one year anniversary. Currently, there is no news on the journalist. We
will only see and hear the media at next year’s anniversary when it will be
calling the police and the Ghana Journalists Association among others on ‘how
far’ the investigations have gone. Can we be serious a little?
Today,
it is Faustina Tay and we must not, yet again, remain silent! This is the right
time for the militant feminists— the so called gender activists— to rise and
fight for their own.
These
gender activists must join some of us in telling the Lebanese government to
abolish the Kafala [sponsorship] system.
Under this system, a migrant domestic worker’s legal status is solely in the
hands of their employers.
The
sad reality is that, one could easily become illegal migrant should the employer
terminate their contract. And the most worrying part of this law is where these
employers are free to seize the domestic workers’ passports. Who does such a
thing in this modern era?
The
African Union must rise and engage the Lebanese government over these abuses
against domestic workers as it is not only Ghanaians suffering this fate.
“On
Tuesday, November 5, the 20th day of the ongoing uprising in
Lebanon, an Ethiopian Airlines flight from Beirut arrived at Addis Ababa's Bole
International Airport. [In] its cargo was seven dead bodies of Ethiopian
domestic workers who had died in Lebanon,” says Lebanese writer and researcher
Joey Ayoub in an opinion piece on Aljazeera’s
website in November 2019.
The
government of Ghana must as well dispel the fears of many including Fraud and
Security Consultant Richard Kumadoe over the seeming inactiveness of the
country’s security services to clamp down on persons who lure our women to
slavery in the Gulf countries.
“I
guess and suspect that the [security] agencies have gone to sleep,” says Mr.
Kumadoe to International Dialogue, “so,
it’s time to wake them up to take their positions and to discharge their
responsibilities in curtailing the widespread of human trafficking especially
Ghanaians to other countries.”
People
who lure these women to Lebanon and such places are engaged in a subtle form of
human trafficking. This, we must admit and act swiftly. Barbara— the maid in Lebanon—
says they were smuggled through the Kotoka International Airport. They did not
go through the laid down checks every passenger goes through. She did not even
have the yellow fever pass!
May
the soul of Faustina Tay find a peaceful rest. And may we not relent on our
effort to seek justice for her. As to whether she was murdered or she committed
suicide, the bottom line is that we now know there was an existing threat on
her life by her employers.
Can
we let #JusticeForTay trend till
something substantial is achieved?
The
writers are international journalists who have interest in the world’s politics
with an unflinching eye mainly on what pertains in Africa. Views expressed here
are solely theirs and do not, in anyway, reflect the editorial policy of this
media organisation.
Email: internationaldialogue2@gmail.com
Twitter: @abisolo7 & @aniwaba