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Capitalism fuelling slavery

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THE education system bequeathed to us by our erstwhile colonisers was deliberately designed to produce job seekers as opposed to citizens with a creative mindset.
Indeed, it used to be the dream of parents to have their ‘educated’ children employed as teachers, nurses or police officers.
The vast majority who failed to get through the education bottleneck, ‘the uneducated’, were ready to offer their labour in any way desired of them.
Reward and working conditions were secondary.
They would hunt for ‘basa rese rese’ (any kind of job).
This later left them vulnerable to the capitalist system which thrives on the exploitation of unskilled labour from the developing countries.
During the days of outright slavery, victims were forced to work long hours for nothing as capitalists benefitted immensely from the inhuman trade.
Slave owners became filthy rich, all in defence of capitalist ethics.
Obscure towns like UK’s Liverpool were transformed overnight into thriving industrial cities because of the vast profits from the slave trade.
Greed, the driving force behind capitalism, saw the Barclays family earn a fortune when slavery was abolished in the 1860s.
Financial compensation, supposed to be given to their freed slaves, was grabbed by this family.
But then that’s the order of life in the dog-eat-dog capitalist world we live in.
Although slavery in the crude sense is said to have been banned, the exploitation of labour of the desperate continues.
And it looks like there is no end in sight.
This exploitation may be by force or through the creation of conditions that induce ‘voluntary’ unconditional offer of labour.
We have seen how wars initiated by capitalists and other forms of punishment like sanctions have devalued the lives of the victims.
This has left war victims in countries like Somalia and Libya, among others, susceptible to sexual enslavement and human traffickers.
People who feel devalued no longer have attachment to their country of birth and of their own volition sneak into any other country and make themselves available for exploitation.
Thus the exploitation of the weak and vulnerable by the strong and powerful has continued as a form of modern day slavery.
Regrettably, colonialism and its off-shoot, capitalism, have created conditions ideal for such situations across the globe.
We have already dealt, in previous issues, with how colonial rule has impoverished and underdeveloped Africa.
This has forced Africans to risk their lives by crossing to Europe in rickety boats to look for jobs.
Of course they believe Europe must be rich because they know that is where their resources were looted to.
And once they succeed, their labour is exploited, reducing them to virtual slaves, while fear of deportation hangs around their necks like the proverbial albatross.
The restriction of domestic immigrant workers to one employer in the UK has subjected maids to abuse bordering on slavery.
With continued stay in the UK determined by possession of a visa, many workers who are ill-treated suffer in silence for fear of deportation.
The visa can be cancelled at any time.
Because colonial rule has already created a fertile ground for slave labourers, traffickers are quick to pounce on this opportunity.
In this edition, we carry a story of how a young Zimbabwean mother was tricked into going to Kuwait expecting handsome financial rewards.
The harrowing ordeal of her stay there, as a virtual captive, is a mirror image of hundreds of other job seekers who have been reduced to modern day slaves, not only in Kuwait but in other countries as well.
This is why the thrust of the new education curriculum strives to mould children into entrepreneurs as opposed to job seekers.
This may in turn reduce the tendency to look for elusive ‘greener pastures’ across the globe.

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