If they showed you a video of a cannibal eating a human being you would probably turn away in disgust. So what would you do if I proved to you that you are no better than a cannibal feeding on your children? Well, we the region’s older generation — those of us in ministries, parliaments and budget committees, from Kampala through Nairobi to Dodoma — have built a system that profits from the desperation of the young and then abandon them to pay with their very lives. We license the agencies that send them abroad, collect the fees, and when they vanish into a trafficking network in Bangkok, or an abusive household in the Gulf, we utter statements of concern.
The story of three Ugandans— Amon Kisaakye, David Musajja and Samuel Kusiima, who travelled to Thailand through a recruitment agency to avoid unemployment and then went silent is neither unique nor unusual. Parliament was told, in the last week of August, that government did not know where they were.
