House helps
are a central part of our lives today. A house help, Nanny, Maid, House girl,
House boy or Domestic servant… many homes depend on them.
By
definition, it means the person employed to perform house hold chores such as
cleaning, washing, cooking and caring for the children. This role is a dominant
feature in most homes in the urban centers regardless of whether the house wife
is working outside the home or not. The house help could be male or female but
is often female, and most often a child. I am commencing my blog posts in 2016
with a series of weekly write-ups on this all important subject. I wish to make
this a broad based discourse and will gladly welcome comments from men, women
and children.
Our starting
point is to examine current trends and practices and then move on to the legal
status of the house help in Nigeria.
The Need
The need for
house helps is a very present one in modern society. Even a full time house
wife has need of someone to help do the chores and run errands if she must stay
healthy and fully attend to her role as wife and mother. It is in fact a myth
that house helps are a function of having working mothers. The major difference
is that the working mother is not as present as the full time housewife to
supervise the house staff all day.
The Source
House helps
can be sourced from the village or from the neighborhood in the city. It is
rare to put out adverts for employment with regards to house helps. Often the
woman in need puts out the word in the community where she lives, or to friends
at work or in church, and those who have a contact make recommendations.
Age
Anyone can
be a house help, whether young, adult, old, male or female. In the northern
states house helps were traditionally older women who also nursed the babies
and gave them suck. These women had fully grown children and were free to move
in with the employer or come in early and stay until late to attend to the
needs of the employer.
But across
the country, house helps are predominantly children, between the ages of 6 to
15. It is more common to engage teenagers who can handle house hold chores and
care for babies, but it is not uncommon to find children as little as 5 or 6
years old caring for smaller babies.
Roles
A house help
performs some traditional chores in the home including sweeping, washing
plates, washing clothes, bathing the children, taking the children to school,
cooking, running errands, and fetching water. They are also known to sometimes perform
non- traditional functions such as helping with homework, putting the generator
on and off, and where a child is involved, they may be further exploited in
satisfying the sexual needs and perversions of the oga and his madam, or of the
older children in the family. Reports indicate that some house wives turn a
blind eye to the continuous rape of the house maid by their husbands in order
to preserve their marriage and position in the home. It is also common for the
house wife to jointly rape the child. So besides the house hold chores child
domestic helps may also be engaged in performing sexual roles in the family.
A live-in
house help has no defined work schedule or work hours. House helps have been
known to start work at 5am and to work until 11 or 12pm. Sometimes they stay
awake until madam goes to bed so they can put off the generator.
Salary
Traditionally
the children of relatives are brought from the village to serve as house helps
in the urban centers with the promise of an education. Such offer is in lieu of
salary or emolument particularly as the employee is a child and is most often a
relative and therefore is considered a ward rather than a worker in the home.
Payment is therefore gratuitous in form of promise of school enrolment the
child in the city, free feeding, board, clothes and general provision and care.
But the terms are not usually clearly defined or stated because the agreement
with the child’s parent is often informal. Therefore the terms can vary at the
whims of the employer.
Where
salaries are to be paid at all for the child’s labour, it is often paid directly
to the parent or through the intermediary. A common practice in some parts is
to keep the pay from January until December so the child can travel home with
the total sum for the parents to invest in the family farm or business.
Salaries for
house help range from 8000 from 15,000 Naira or a little more depending on the
city. It may be less in some small cities where the cost of living is not as
high as in Lagos, Abuja or Port Harcourt.
