Some Nigerian female returnees, from Saudi Arabia and Oman after their failed job-hunting experience, share their stories with GBENGA ADERANTI.
• Victim taken to 20-room house, made to wash all occupants’ clothes every day
• ‘Injections meant for psychiatric patients administered on me for seven days’
It has been five years since Baleqees (surname withheld) returned from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia where she had gone in search of greener pastures, but the scars of her failed expedition remain visible.
Because of her ugly experience in the Middle-East country, Baleqees had become taciturn and hardly talks unless you go out of your way to engage her in serious jokes. Her story, like those of some other Nigerians who had visited the Arab country before her, is as chilling as they come.
“I wish I could reveal my identity,” she said as she launched into some details about her ugly experience.
“I want you to pass this message on to African ladies, especially Nigerians. Many are being trafficked to Saudi Arabia to suffer.”
For 31-year-old Baleqees, her original plan was to go to Canada or somewhere else in Europe. Unfortunately, she was unable to secure a visa, hence one of her father’s friends convinced her to go to Riyadh and her father consented.
She was, however, least prepared for the reality that confronted her in Saudi Arabia’s capital city.
“We were promised lucrative jobs in Riyadh. Unknown to us, those agents were sheep in wolf’s clothing.
“While they acted like good people, they did not mind trafficking us to Riyadh to die,” she said.
It was not until she got to the oil-rich country that she discovered that all the promises made by the agent that facilitated her journey from Nigeria were a sham.
Contrary to the good life that was promised her, Baleqees was taken into servitude and forced to serve 14 people.
“It was not their business whether you eat or not,” she said as she revealed that the hardship faced by many Nigerian ladies in the Arab country is grossly under-reported.
“Many of them are dead while others are missing. Some work without being paid, and when they demand their salaries, they get killed.
“Many of the girls are sexually harassed, and if you rebuff their advances, it could spell doom. Also, you risk being killed by your wife’s employer if she knows you have been sleeping with her husband. It is double jeopardy.”
Besides, she said, it is very difficult for trafficked ladies to terminate their contract with their agents midway. She, therefore, asked the Federal Government to find a way of halting the activities of the Nigerian agents.
Baleqees said: “Sometimes if you want to leave before finishing your contract, it is a big problem.
“Even when you finish your contract and you want to leave, it is another problem.
”Because of the easy money agents make in this business, the job agents put up stiff resistance any time a lady decides to quit the job.
“And if you insist that you are no longer interested in their work, they will seize your passport.”
One of the regrets Baleqees will have to live with was having to change her original name in a bid to procure the passports with which she travelled abroad. It is now a big dilemma for her as she can no longer revert to her old name, hence whatever she had achieved with the old name remains useless unless she is willing to do away with her post-name-change activities and accomplishments.
She bears the foreign name on her passport where she currently works.
Shattered dream
Although it has been quite a while since Baleeqees returned to Nigeria, she is yet to ascertain the true identity of the woman that ‘tricked’ her to Riyadh.
Her contact with an agent identified simply as Madam Bose had changed the course of her life.
“The agreement was that we were going to Saudi Arabia to work as house helps. Our employers would provide everything we needed, including clothing, feeding, toiletries, shoes, medicine, and accommodation, and we would enjoy our freedom,” she said.
In fact, the offer was so tempting that the ladies were promised that they would be working with three to five ladies, with each of them handling different chores.
By the time Baleqees got to Riyadh, however, it was a different story from the one Madam Bose had told them. To Baleqees’ chagrin, she was made to work with a family of 16 people in a 20-room building.
“I had to clean all the rooms, wash all the clothes, cook, and serve everyone. I cooked more than six times a day. Sometimes I would not go to bed because I would have to work until morning.”
To make matters worse, she would not be allowed to eat the food. And she probably would have not complained if Madam Bose had kept her promise of paying her 800 riyals (about N80,000 Nigerian) monthly.
Baleqees got another shock in Riyadh as she was told that she would have to refund all the money paid on her behalf to come to Riyadh. She said: “My boss (employer) told me that she paid all my expenses to Riyadh through the agent.
“On hearing this, my system changed. I knew it was a lie as nobody paid any money to me.” According to her, the N800,000 paid for traveling expenses was raised through her savings and those of her father.
Aside from that, she had to pay another N80,000 to ‘disvirgin’ her passport before leaving Nigeria.
Baleqees was in a Catch-99 situation as she could contact neither her parents nor her agent.
She said the racket was so organised that once you landed at the airport, the people they brought you to were already at the airport to collect you and seize your passport.
Meanwhile, before leaving Nigeria, the girls were subjected to a series of medical tests to confirm their pregnancy status. “I did mine somewhere around Mpappe, Abuja,” she said.
Not long after her arrival in Riyadh, she started having problems with her boss.
“I told her that I wanted to return to Nigeria. Rather than listen to my request, she took me inside his car and drove me to another place, with the intention to sell me to another person,” she said.
Although Baleqees does not speak Arabic, she said from their gestures, she could deduce that the man wanted to sell her.
“My boss collected money from the new man after pointing at me, and instinct told me that he had sold me to another person,” she said.
The deal, however, could not sail through as Baleqees refused to alight from the car, and her frustrated boss was left with no choice but to take her back home.
More trouble for Baleqees
Baleqees’ obduracy became too much for her boss, and the only option left was to get rid of her. Consequently, she was taken to a place in the form of a police station, where her boss lodged a complaint about her.
“The next thing I saw was a paper and they told me to sign on it. Everything was written in Arabic, so I didn’t understand anything that was written in the paper.
“From that office, they drove us to another place where I met other nationalities from Ghana, Brazil and other countries.
“Here, there were many people who were mentally challenged.”
She said for the period she stayed at the place, they were fed regularly, and it was probably the only time she had good food throughout her stay in Riyadh.
The experience, however, did not last.
“Suddenly, one big bus started coming, and we would go on a ride to a place that never looked like a hospital. Without complaining of any ailment, they started giving us psychotic drugs to use,” She said.
While Baleqees was smart enough not to use the drugs, she had no way of avoiding the injection that was constantly administered on her for seven days.
“The injection drained my body and my body started peeling until it became white. At one point, I could no longer stand up without being aided. That was when they contacted my family members in Nigeria.”
She said her parents were told that she was mentally ill and she was deported to Abuja, Nigeria without anything except the gown she wore on that day.
“By the time we got to Abuja, I could only see three out of the 20 people that left Saudi Arabia with me, and two of the three were mentally ill. The truth is I did not have any mental problem except that I was weak.”
Although she arrived in Abuja a miserable figure, luck smiled on Baleqees as a Good Samaritan gave her the transport fare to Ibadan, Oyo State capital.
“On getting to Ibadan, they took me straight to the General Hospital. Here, I spent another three months on the hospital bed.
“With the help of my parents and family members, we managed to settle the hospital bills.”
Spats with callous agent
Shortly after Baleqees regained her health, her parents confronted the Nigerian agent that facilitated her journey to Saudi Arabia. But rather than being sober, the agent dismissed the whole saga, saying that my parents should thank God that I came back alive. She said they should just take care of me and let it go.
Baleqees says she feels sad each time she remembers the episode.
“But I thank God that I’m still alive. I won’t even pray for my enemy to go there. It is better to stay in Nigeria and manage than go to an Arab country.”
She appealed to the Nigerian government to do everything possible to stop human trafficking. “Our government should please empower our youths so that they will stop finding what is not lost,” she said.
Frustration drove me to Oman
On her part, Adetutu, an Oman returnee, was just 26 years old when she was brought back into the country in 2016. Now a married mother of two, she relived her experience as a maid in the oil-rich country with regrets.
Frustration, unemployment, and general hardship had prompted her boyfriend then to propose the idea of traveling to Oman to her, and she did not hesitate to jump at the opportunity.
Though unemployed, frustrated, and unhappy, Adetutu said a seemingly innocuous offer from a neighbour fired her interest in the journey.
She said: “I was seeking the job before my neighbour, Lanre, told me that his sister, Kehinde, sent him a WhatsApp message from Egypt that her agent asked if she had any lady that would like to go to Oman to work as a housemaid.
“So when the guy talked to me about it, I decided to talk to my boyfriend about it. He asked how much it would cost and the agent said I would have to pay N200,000. My ex-boyfriend paid twice.”
Thereafter, Adetutu was full of expectations. Unknown to her, the situation that awaited her was completely different from the picture the agents had painted.
Speaking to The Nation earlier, she had said: “What the agent told me wasn’t what I experienced over there because before I left Nigeria, he told me I would be taken care of and I would be free.
“To my surprise, when I got there it wasn’t like that… The day we got there, because we were three girls that travelled from Nigeria, we were taken to (The Middle-East Sophisticated Project Manpower Office) where we stayed for three days before sponsors from different places came around to pick us up one by one for what we were there for (house-help).”
She never bargained for what she met when she got to the place where she was engaged. She had thought her employers were going to be friendly, but that was not to be as her passport and mobile phones were collected from her. She was later told that she would not be able to communicate with her family members for two years, and if she chose to, she would have to recharge the phone of her sponsor and could only communicate with her mum.
“I would wake up daily around 5 am and sometimes sleep at 11pm or 12 midnight, busy doing house chores…
“Breakfast was always around 4 pm in the evening, but whenever I was hungry, I would steal bread from the fridge and take it to the bathroom to eat so they wouldn’t see me eating their food, because I don’t like being hungry.
“They won’t allow us to go out for anything. Their houses were like prisons. All their gates were always locked.”
When she could not bear it any longer, she became rebellious; an act that made many employers reject her, and her sponsors were left with no choice but to offload her.
But it was not until they made a demand from her boyfriend that she was given her documents to return to Nigeria.
While her phone had been seized, she was fortunate to have access to the phone of one of the girls. Through that, she was communicating with her boyfriend about the crisis she was facing in Oman.
Adetutu’s boyfriend eventually got across and a ticket was arranged for her to return to Nigeria but not without parting with her three weeks’ salary.
“When I told them at the office that I was no longer working and that I was going back home, I was told by a guy working in the office, an Egyptian named Sahid, who said I won’t be given my three weeks salary which was 15k.
“In short, I wasn’t given my salary and my phone with sim.”
While Adetutu might have returned to Nigeria unscathed, others were not so lucky.
According to her, one of her colleagues was turned into a sex object by her male employer who was sleeping with her at will. And to make matters worse, when the woman, an elderly Alhaja, who brought her to Oman was contacted, she was unperturbed, insisting that there was no big deal in the way the Nigerian girl was being treated.
“Irrespective of what I go through in Nigeria, nothing would ever make me take such a risk. It is not a place to be.”
‘Parents are culpable’
In spite of ugly tales of human degradation faced by trafficked returnees, many parents are still encouraging their female children to try their luck.
According to a report by The Nation, sometime in July 2021, the Niger State Police Command rescued five victims from being taken to Libya by human traffickers.
During the investigations carried out by the police, it was discovered that one of the parents of the victims was in the know of the whole saga.
The female victims, aged between 18 and 23 years, hail from Ondo, Edo, Delta, and Ogun states, and were on their way to Libya
One of the suspects, Osaruwumen (49) claimed it was not his first time of making the journey, saying: “I usually pay N150,000 for the whole trip. But this time, I had to go along with someone because her mother asked her to follow me to Libya.
One of the victims, who was with Osaruwumen, said she was told to follow him to Libya where she would find her way to Italy to meet her uncle who works and lives there.
She said: “Osaruwumen lives in my area. He is a bricklayer. When he told my mother he was travelling, my mother asked me to follow him to Libya, and that when I got to Libya, I would cross to Italy to meet my uncle.
“I am a tailor. I did not want to go, but my mother said I should go; that I would make a lot of money if I did. My mother knows everything.
“Even my uncle, I spoke to him and he said it was okay; that I would get a job there.”
Another victim, who was then a 300-level student, said that a woman in her neighbourhood told her mother that her daughter in Libya said that workers were needed and they should go for the jobs.
“I and three others were told that we would meet Madam’s daughter in Libya, who would get us a job as there was high demand for workers there.
“That was why my mother allowed me to go on the trip.
“They told us we would work as housemaids or cleaners, taking care of animals on the farm or cleaning old people’s homes.”
Despite the hardship being faced, many of the ladies are not dissuaded in their resolve to go to places like Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Lebanon, and Oman.
From agent’s perspective
Despite the tales of woes told by some of the ladies that had gone in search of jobs in the Arab and the Middle-East countries, an agent Mutiu Ibrahim, who has been in Egypt for more than 10 years, told our correspondent that in view of the pervading hardship in Nigeria, more and more Nigerians would risk travelling abroad in search of a better life.
Ibrahim said: “The poverty in the land is too much for a sane human being to bear. And until the situation of the country improves, Nigerian ladies will continue to explore other countries for better prospects.”
Dismissing the thinking that all the ladies taken to Arab countries are meant for prostitution, he said for ladies that are hardworking, the jobs of maids and housekeeping are available in Egypt.
He warned that ladies who are coming to Egypt with the mindset to prostitute should perish the thought as they would be disappointed.
While admitting that the majority of ladies go to the Middle East and Arab countries do menial jobs, he said the agency has a big role to play in the type of job a person coming from Nigeria would get.
He faulted the claims in many quarters that most agencies use these ladies for prostitution, warning that it is very dangerous to do that in Egypt.
“Some of the Egyptians are involved in this racketeering. You must not be caught because the consequences are grave. Many of the ladies were deported because they were caught engaging in prostitution.”
He also disclosed that Nigerians and other non-Arabs have some latitude to the extent that they do not cause a breach of the peace.
“They have drinking joints here and there, but it is coded. Their authorities pretend as if they do not exist as long as they are not overt. You don’t bring it out and you don’t display it.”
Returnees from the Middle East and Arab countries always complain of exploitation and that they are made to engage in prostitution.
But explaining why Nigerian ladies get into trouble, Ibrahim who is an employment agent, explained that most girls get into trouble because of their fraudulent behaviour.
Contrary to the allegations of slavery and exploitation, Ibrahim said it is a win-win situation for ladies.
He said: “For me, I don’t know of other Arab countries. As far as Egypt is concerned, it is not so.
“If 100 people are doing legit work, there is the possibility that 20 percent of them could be dishonest. But the majority of the agents here are honest.
“In all honesty, it is the ladies who benefit more from the deal; not the agents and the sponsors.”
He explained that there is always an agreement between the sponsors and the ladies.
According to him, the sponsors and the ladies agree on the number of years the ladies would work to pay back the money spent in facilitating their traveling abroad and the cost of getting jobs for these ladies.
The job of the agent abroad ends after collecting his commission from securing a housemaid job for the Nigerian lady.
“But the sponsors benefit more. In most cases, they pay their sponsors for a year or more before they start earning money for themselves. But then the ladies collect stipends and upkeep, part of which the lady sends back home to their families.”
Ibrahim said the sponsor is expected to be responsible for her medical bills during the time she is paying back what was spent to bring her into the Middle East or some of these area countries.
“Some of these girls have medical issues before leaving Nigeria; the sponsors are responsible for their medical well-being,” he said.
The Nation gathered that after the initially agreed 18 months or less, some of the ladies stay five to seven years, working and earning money on their own.
“I know of 10 girls who have stayed between five and 10 years after settling their sponsors. If they are truly exploiting them, they won’t receive a dime,” he said.
Ibrahim noted that things are better organised in Nigeria, saying some ladies do come to Nigeria on holidays. Some, during their off days, go to their sponsors and for those free periods, they attend parties.
“Employment agents like me are just brokers between the maids, agents, and employers. The maids may not be able to contact me directly, but they contact me via their sponsors.
“Anytime there is a vacancy, I would contact the sponsors, can you do it? This is the amount they are willing to pay, these are the terms and conditions, then I get my commission,” Ibrahim said.
“While it may be true that some of the girls who are taken to other countries do prostitution, in Egypt, it may be a bit difficult as prostitution is not profitable here. This is because Nigerian men who are supposed to be their clients do not earn much to allow for such excesses.
“Most men do menial jobs here, except a few professionals that are seconded from Nigeria by multinational companies. They make good money, unlike those who travelled to this place on their own.
“It is difficult to get jobs for men. The best he can earn is 300 dollars. By the time he eats and transports himself, the money is gone. Is that the type of guy that would look for women? If a lady gives him a bill of 100 dollars, will be able to pay?
“Most ladies who go there with the mind of engaging in prostitution get frustrated because they would not make money, unlike those that do the menial jobs.
“It is not common for Nigerian ladies to do prostitution in Egypt.”
The agent, who has been in Egypt for more than a decade, said that no Nigerian lady has ever been caught engaging in prostitution, because unlike other places, it is not easy to get a visa to Egypt.
“If you’re told that your daughter would enter Egypt by road, it is a lie. Probably, they are taking you to Libya.
‘If anybody says he or she is going to Egypt by road, that means that person has a fake visa and there is no way he would be able to enter Egypt
“Egyptian visa is difficult to get. That is why agents charge so much to facilitate travelling to Egypt.”
He disclosed that those sponsoring these girls to Egypt ask for big money and put a clause in the contract that the ladies would pay for 18 months.
The Nation gathered that the agents ask for between N400,000 and N450,000 for visa fees from ladies, excluding ticketing or other fees.
The only Africans that can enter Egypt by road are the Sudanese. The Egyptians see them as refugees and when these Sudanese enter Egypt, they head straight to the camp.
“From my experience, there are always housekeeping jobs/maid jobs readily available for ladies.
“Nigerians are not the only people doing the jobs; there are many Asians competing for the same jobs, including Indians, Pakistanis, and Filipinos.
“There is always a steady order for housekeeping jobs because there are so many families.”
For the Nigerian ladies coming to Egypt, he advised that they should respect their culture and be decently dressed.
“Don’t think you will make money from prostitution; stay away from it.
“As long as you are not tempted to steal from your employer, you are not likely to get into trouble. The money you are going to earn is enough to take care of yourself and your family.
“I always tell the ladies I give jobs not to follow men because it is the unemployed Nigerian men that would finish their earnings.”
He is of the opinion that Egypt is far better than places like Oman.
“I know of a lady who left Cairo for Oman. She told me that her three years in Oman were a disaster.
“In Cairo, you don’t feel you are not in Nigeria. You are free and you visit people, unlike Oman where it is work, work and work from morning to night. It is work 24/7 there. She told me that was her experience.
“Those in Oman do not have freedom like those in Egypt. In Egypt, Nigerians bring artises, we go for shows, we do naming ceremonies and weddings just the way we do it in Nigeria.
“People do wear ‘aso ebi’ anytime there is a naming ceremony or wedding, but you can’t do that in Oman. Egypt is liberal.”
He said most times, what the Nigerian ladies go through in the Middle East is exaggerated.
Ibrahim told The Nation about a video of Nigerian ladies that went viral on the internet, saying “the question is why is it that most of them still prefer to stay there? The truth is that most ladies do not have the power to do these odd jobs. That is why they complain a lot.
“I think the freedom they don’t have is what is making them complain. Imagine a person who was not doing house chores before leaving Nigeria and found herself being ordered around by some people.”
He said he has not had an issue with his clients, and he always tells them to call him first.
“I would settle it before it degenerates. I always make sure that those ladies have guarantors too before I can connect them with those needing their service in Egypt,” he said.
