Editorial: Suffering In Qatar - The Result Of Unemployment

News last Tuesday about the plight of Ghanaians, who are currently in Qatar, struggling to make ends meet, because of uncertainty surrounding their living conditions left not only relations of the affected persons worried, but also a lot of Ghanaians in general.

Many members of the group, who had been flown to Qatar with the promise of jobs, were complaining about a delay in paying them their wages, even after coming to the stark realization that they were going to receive less sums than they had anticipated.

Whereas the urgency with which the Ministry of Manpower, Youth and Employment, has attached to the situation, to send a team to Qatar next week to verify at first hand the conditions in which the Ghanaians are living is welcome.

The Chronicle believes however that our foreign missions ought to be staffed with very qualified persons who can handle matters of this nature when they arise.

It is the view of The Chronicle that since missions are to secure the interest of the country and its people abroad, we endeavour to get citizens to register with such missions abroad and be educated on the services available to them from such channels.

The Chronicle believes that when this is done, it would go a long way in allaying the anxieties that our people experience abroad, when they are confronted with crisis.

Ghanaians should be worried about the current situation in which the Ghanaians in Qatar find themselves because these were persons who were recruited in bulk from here, through official channels, after due diligence had been done. The fate of many others may never become public knowledge.

The situation getting where it did, before attracting official attention, was just symptomatic of our lack of monitoring of programmes and projects that we give endorsements to.

Considering all the pains that the ministry claims to have deployed, including conducting due diligence on the Qatari company, Al-Jabar and its local partners, Rahman Consultancy, as well as the involvement of state security apparatus, one would have thought that this was a programme that should have been referred to the Ghanaian mission responsible for Qatar for monitoring.

At least, that is what the foreign missions are for – to take off from where they are located and protect the sovereignty of the nation, which resides in its people.

But above all, looking at the problem confronting the Ghanaians in Qatar as an isolated case of about two hundred Ghanaians facing temporary hardships would amount to scratching the surface of a bigger problem confronting us.

The reality of the problem is that we are confronted with an unemployment situation that has assumed gargantuan dimension that we need to address and urgently too. At the same time, both leaders and citizens agree that our nation is not developing at a pace that we want it to, in spite of some of the economic indices that we show.

It therefore behoves us to take conscious steps at creating the conditions that would attract investors into, particularly, the manufacturing sector that always has the capacity to create more jobs right from the factories through distribution and retailing networks.

The current situation where we continue to allow the importation of, sometimes, goods of inferior quality and probably dumping that end up crowding out local producing companies, must stop somewhere.

It may be a temporary relief to see our unemployed workforce finding alternative channels, thereby relieving us of the pressures of finding them jobs. However, we must be conscious of the push-out factors and address them, so we don’t turn round to lament about brain drain.