Qatar is a peninsular Arab country whose terrain comprises an arid desert and a long Persian (Arab) submerse shoreline of tantalising sceneries. It is also an industrial country that has ultramodern architecture, dawning from its ancient Islamic infrastructural civilisation. Doha, the capital city is well known for its elfin skyscrapers and alluring shores. it is a world-class capital city, home to the limestone Museum of Islamic Art. Thanks to the World Cup tournament, the oil-producing country is ready to spread its dominance even more, by hosting the global spectacle this year.
However, this write-up is not purposely out to eulogise Qatar or its capital city, nor attempt to lay statistical predictions of the World Cup tournament. No! But if you are an intending immigrant, if you have started giving a deposit to an agent that will take you to Qatar as a worker, if your dream is to get to Qatar and share all the pictures on WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, then fasten your seat belt; the ride is yours.
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Well, first of all, let me clear one thing for you, my friend having a dream is not wrong at all, it is in fact something inherent in all of us. In the same route, having the dream of migrating to any country in the world is not wrong, chase your dream and work for it. However, you must be careful enough not to be fooled, enslaved and handcuffed by projections and assumptions. If you are going anywhere, make sure you hold yourself tied to your honour and integrity. Make sure that your personality as a human is assured.
I write this piece to enlighten some of my people that have the intention of migrating especially and specifically to Qatar. Qatar is a veiled bride if you are a third-class groom! This write-up shall unveil the bride.
This is an output of research that dips into the plight of migrants in Qatar. Perhaps, emigrants suffer in different places across the world due to distinctive reasons but Qatar is uniquely so infamous for its treatment of migrants.
I watched a series of documentaries that taped agonising stories of how blacks and Asians are maltreated in Qatar. In normal cases, our people cooperate with agents and pay a fairly lot of money to process their migration to countries like Qatar. Contracts are signed with all sorts of promises, such as shelter, food and a good salary per month. Such deals are always mouth-watering to suffering Nigerians and other people across under-developing countries. But they always come with unbearable prices.
If you refer to how this write-up described Qatar in the opening lines, the least you should expect from such a country is having almost zero judicial systems that will handle civil charges in courts. But not until 2018 did the city of Doha get a labour court parlour with only six judges to address complaints of its migrant workers. It is even more baffling to hear that the labour court in Doha admitted that out of over two thousand complaints it received only sixty-nine were processed.
These complaints are in most cases against host companies of these migrant workers whose salaries are withheld for months. Ibrahim (a Kenyan migrant in Qatar) laments in a France 24 documentary that he and his coworkers received no salary for over three months and this practice is normal. He added that, in the contract they signed, they were promised good living conditions, food and timely salaries but none of these was ever honoured. To make things worse, their passports were seized which means they cannot return home at will.
In another interview with some Phinipinos who work under one Qatari lady, they said in their three years of work that day was their first day off. Another one cried that he would not want his people to see his condition and he sometimes goes out at night to snap some happy pictures, even though he is chased by the police sometimes!
It is disheartening that even in airports Qatari security agents embarrass travellers and deny them basic provisions especially if their visitor holds a passport from an African country or even worse Nigeria.
An undersecretary for the Minister of Labour admitted that despite having a tribunal now, some of the business leaders are opposed to them and therefore some of the policies are purely and only theoretical. Some of the migrants taped in court waiting rooms appear visibly hopeless and helpless.
All these are only some of the realities in Qatar, only the victims of this ancient way of thinking can tell you how it feels to be denied your fundamental rights as a human, just because of your skin colour, or social status. The Doha News proclaimed how almost all the infrastructures in the country are built by migrants. Yet, when workers die at construction sites, the only tribute they get is having their pictures pasted on a wall. Thanks to the mobile stadium constructed for the World Cup, hundreds of people sacrificed their lives to win bread for their families.
In the final analysis, my aim is to make you pause and pose a question for yourself: in what capacity are you migrating? Who are you going to work with? What type of job are you looking for? If things did not work out, how are you planning to return home? If things are working, what is your reward at the final end?
Think twice, it is said in Hausa “tsalle daya a ke a fada rijiya, amma sai an yi dubu ba a fito ba” which means it takes a single jump into a well but one will jump a thousand times without getting out.
Abubakar Aminu Ibrahim can be reached on [email protected]
