Scores of Ghanaians are stranded in Dubai after being ditched by their travelling agents.
They allege that the agents lured them to pay huge sums of money for job placements, only to be left on their own when they arrived in the United Arab Emirates City.
Most of these young people who are found in a town called Deira in Dubai, attributed their plight to unemployment challenges in Ghana.
“I came to Dubai for greener pastures,” One of the told the media.
For some, they had to spend all their entire savings; others sold properties, while some went to the extent of taking loans in order to process their movement out of the country.
They are motivated by the fanciful stories of how it is all rosy in foreign countries only to find out the situation is not that rosy.
Emmanue Adjei who has been in Dubai for more than three years explains the difficulty in getting a job.
“Things are different from what we envisaged. You can only get a job through an agent, but their rate is costly, and they are not trustworthy”.
A visit to Deira, a town synonymous to Makola in Accra which is seen as the commercial hub of Dubai, revealed Ghanaians together with other foreign nationals mostly Africans sitting on a lawn in pairs.
It emerged that these were homeless people who had nowhere to go and had turned the park into their homes.
Some of them explained how the activities of dubious travel agents are to account for their predicament.
“The agents deceive us. They will first rent a room for you and run away with your money. By the time you come back to your senses, your rent had expired, and you are homeless. We have to struggle with police officers every day.”
“An agent charged me GH¢6,000 with the promise of giving me a job. We are only employed in the construction sector, for which you do not get any wage for the first month. The challenge is that our Visas only last for a month, making the entire trip meaningless.”
Caught up in this web, they are forced to live in the open, struggling day and night to fend for themselves and even take care of their hygiene needs.
“We sleep in the open with all our clothes outside. We don’t even have a place to dry our clothes when we wash them. Most of us are Africans. We do not have anywhere to go. We live here with ladies. We bath thrice a week”.
