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Unpaid wages, beatings, sexual assualt: Why Kenya, Uganda workers keep dying in Saudi

Eunice Achieng on the day she left for Saudi Arabia. She was found dead in a rooftop water tank.

On any given day in Kenya, dozens, if not hundreds of women buzz around the Nairobi international airport’s departure area. They huddle for selfies in matching T-shirts, discussing how they’ll spend the money from their new jobs in Saudi Arabia.

Lured by company recruiters and encouraged by Kenya’s government, the women have reason for optimism. Spend two years in Saudi Arabia as a housekeeper or nanny, the pitch goes, and you can earn enough to build a house, educate your children and save for the future.

While the departure terminal hums with anticipation, the arrival area is where hope meets grim reality. Hollow-cheeked women return, often ground down by unpaid wages, beatings, starvation and sexual assault. Some are broke. Others are in coffins.

At least 274 Kenyan workers, mostly women, have died in Saudi Arabia in the past five years — an extraordinary figure for a young workforce doing jobs that, in most countries, are considered extremely safe.

Autopsy reports are vague and contradictory. They describe women with evidence of trauma, including burns and electric shocks, all labelled natural deaths. One woman’s cause of death was simply “brain dead”. An untold number of Ugandans have died, too, but their government releases no data.

There are people who are supposed to protect these women — government officials like Fabian Kyule Muli, vice-chairman of the labour committee in Kenya’s National Assembly. The powerful committee could demand thorough investigations into worker deaths, pressure the government to negotiate better protections from Saudi Arabia or pass laws limiting migration until reforms are enacted.

But Muli, like other East African officials, also owns a staffing company that sends women to Saudi Arabia. One of them, Margaret Mutheu Mueni, said that her Saudi boss had seized her passport, declared that he had “bought” her and frequently withheld food. When she called the staffing agency for help, she said, a company representative told her, “You can swim across the Red Sea and get yourself back to Kenya”.

In Kenya, Uganda and Saudi Arabia, a New York Times investigation found, powerful people have incentives to keep the flow of workers moving, despite widespread abuse. Members of the Saudi royal family are major investors in agencies that place domestic workers. Politicians and their relatives in Uganda and Kenya own staffing agencies, too.

The line between their public and private roles sometimes blurs.

Kenya and Uganda are deep in a years-long economic slump, and remittances from foreign workers are a significant source of income. Even after other countries negotiated deals with Saudi Arabia that guaranteed worker protections, East African countries missed opportunities to do the same, records show.

Kenya’s Commission on Administrative Justice declared in 2022 that worker-protection efforts had been hindered by “interference by politicians who use proxies to operate the agencies”.

Undeterred, Kenya’s President, William Ruto, says he wants to send up to half a million workers to Saudi Arabia in the coming years. One of his top advisers, Moses Kuria, has owned a staffing agency.

Recruiting companies work closely with Saudi agencies that are similarly well-connected. Together, these agencies paint a rosy picture of work in Saudi Arabia. But when things go wrong, families say, the workers are often left to fend for themselves.

A Kenyan housekeeper, Eunice Achieng, called home in a panic in 2022, saying that her boss had threatened to kill her and throw her in a water tank. “She was screaming, ‘Please come save me!’” her mother recalled. Achieng soon turned up dead in a rooftop water tank, her mother said. Saudi health officials said her body was too decomposed to determine how she died. The Saudi police labelled it a “natural death”.

In Uganda, Isiko Moses Waiswa said that when he learned his wife had died in Saudi Arabia, her employer there gave him a choice: her body or her $2,800 in wages.

“I told him that I want the body of my wife,” Waiswa said.

A Saudi autopsy found that his wife, Aisha Meeme, was emaciated. She had extensive bruising, three broken ribs and what appeared to be severe electrocution burns on her ear, hand and feet. The Saudi authorities declared that she had died of natural causes.

Roughly half a million Kenyan and Ugandan workers are in Saudi Arabia today, the Saudi government says.

Recruiters fan out across East Africa, from impoverished hilltop villages to the cinder block neighbourhoods of Nairobi and Kampala, the Ugandan capital.

They search for people desperate, and ambitious, enough to leave their families for low-paying jobs in a country where they do not know the native language. People like Faridah Nassanga.

“We are really poor,” Nassanga said, sitting outside her one-room concrete home in Kampala. Meals are cooked on a propane burner in the alley beside a trickling sewage gutter.

Nassanga said a friend introduced her in 2019 to an agent and she agreed to move to Saudi Arabia for a job paying about $200 a month.

Initially, she found her housekeeping job as pleasant as recruiters had promised. Then one day, she said, her boss’s husband walked into her room and raped her. Afterwards, she said, he kicked and slapped her. When she became pregnant, Nassanga’s boss accused her of sleeping with the husband. The Saudi family put her on a plane back to Uganda, said Abdallah Kayonde, who runs a legal-aid group that is trying to get compensation for her.

Now, Nassanga is back sharing a one-room home with her mother, her two older children and her toddler — a boy with a notably different complexion and hair from his siblings.

Saudi law says that when a worker needs to go home, an employer, recruiter or the Saudi government is obligated to pay.

But workers and worker-rights advocates say that labourers are often forced to pay. Those without money can be detained.

As migration to Saudi Arabia surged, reports of deaths and injuries spread across East Africa. Bodies began arriving. Each story brought new outrage.

New York Times News Service