It is not Russians’ fault that young African ladies make themselves available for questionable recruitment to build drones
The more than two-year war between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Ukraine keeps expanding its global impact. The recent report about the Kremlin recruiting African, Asian, and South American women aged 18-22 to fill an urgent labour shortage in wartime Russia raised eyebrows and must be of serious concern not just for the developing countries involved in Africa like Uganda, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Sudan, but to the global community.
This comes at a time when immigration, either as a national border issue, nationalistic populist political issue or socio-economic movement of distressed citizens of the underdeveloped world, has become a topical issue. The International Labour Organization (ILO) has many laws meant to protect world citizens from exploitations through flawed and dubious employment processes.
The fact that about 200 young African women at the zenith of their productive lives were dubiously recruited to work along Russian vocational students in a plant about 1,000 kilometres east of Moscow must worry both individual African countries and the continental body, the African Union (AU), the sub regional bodies — the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the South African Development Community (SADC) and many others; they must wake up and smell the coffee, literally.
We understand that the age of adulthood is 18 and none of the recruited Africans is a minor. However, the process must matter. There are allegations that the social media adverts used to trap the young African women were utterly couched in dubiety. There were promises of ‘free plane tickets, money and a far-away adventure in Europe’. The incentive was, ‘just complete a computer game and a 100-word Russian vocabulary test’.
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However, instead of a work-study programme in sectors of productive interests like hospitality, care-giving and catering, most of the recruited women were herded into drone factories in Russia’s Tatarstan region, in a field they had neither passion for nor expertise in – making weapons of war, assembling thousands of Iranian-designed attack drones for use against Ukrainian targets.
We condemn what obviously comes off as human trafficking, given the seeming deception involved in the recruitment process. The alleged restriction of their movements might be conceded as the right of every nation to protect its territorial integrity, but there are global labour laws that ought to be obeyed, both nationally and internationally. Recruitment for labour services must not be under any socio-economic subterfuge.
While we condemn Russia and her agents for running what seems like false labour recruitment process and deceiving young women from Africa and other developing countries, we must hold African and other leaderships accountable. Economic migration has become the albatross of many developing and poor countries decades after independence. It is a huge paradox that a continent blessed with enormous human and material resources has been unable to functionally develop.
Economic migration happens when the most productive demographic decide to move out of their birth countries in search of the proverbial ‘greener grass’, that is fundamentally a product of the African ‘un-watered grass’, a euphemism for the ineffectual leadership in Africa that has failed the people. The sad part is that economic migration by young Africans now seems so attractive that a country like Nigeria has even developed a vocabulary for the process. ‘Japa’, is a word in Yoruba language that depicts ‘moving out’.
Development is about empowering the people and maximising the resources available. African countries have continued to be the contradiction of being a continent so blessed that the west continually exploits its raw materials and human resources for its own development. In some weird way, Africa seems not to have weaned herself from the vestiges of slavery and colonialism, the processes that were, ab initio, for the benefits of the continents that engaged in the two human vices. Today, human trafficking is a global problem but Africa has a huge problem of doing nothing to completely minimise its impact on the African work force and resources.
This incident has come to light because of the advantages of technology. Information and communication now rule the world, but only work maximally for nations that tap into the unlimited benefits they bring. The African Union, ECOWAS, SADC and other continental and regional bodies must be more about development and collaboration for the African countries. We hope that actions can be taken to repatriate the young ladies in this sad case, and the agents prosecuted.
