Dubai: A Kuwaiti non-government organisation is lobbying for the abolishment of the country's current sponsorship programme and the creation of a comprehensive plan based on modern principles to replace local recruitment practices.
Nasser Al Abdali, Chairman of the Kuwaiti Society for Developing Democracy, who is leading the anti-sponsorship campaign, told Gulf News he is aware of a number of people who are unfairly gaining from the current recruitment system. He proposes putting an end to sponsorship and is confident that the government will do so and replace it with more sensible system.
Visa mafia
Referring to the 'visa mafia', who charge workers for getting jobs in Kuwait, Al Abdali said the money being made is illegal by local and international law which equates it to human trafficking.
"Kuwait will lose part of its international credibility if such a corrupt system is allowed to go on," he warned.
He said the sponsorship system as a tool to control the entry of foreigners into the country for actual job vacancies is being highly misused and more than 800,000 foreign workers had come to the country with no fixed assignment.
"They just bought the visa from the sponsors and were left astray to find their own jobs," Al Abdali said.
"What makes me optimistic about the success of the anti-sponsorship campaign is the fact that there are loud voices that can be heard against sponsorship in more than one Gulf country.
"Authorities in Saudi Arabia announced recently that they are planning to scrap the sponsorship system and replace it with another recruitment system for foreign workers," he said.
Labour attache
Al Abdali said one of the options available to Kuwait is to appoint a labour attache in each of the embassies in countries known for exporting manpower to Kuwait.
The attache would be able to scrutinise work applications, classify them and feed them in to a central data bank.
Then businesses that need to import labourers could access the data to make a selection according to their needs.
