The Kenyan government, which occasionally remembers its children abroad, in the ‘diaspora’ as they say here, has decided to put up a ‘Warning’ sign at airport gates: Fellow citizens, do not use your tourist visa to look for work.

Translated from bureaucratese: stop going abroad with hope in your suitcase and the wrong permit in your pocket. This is also because, as a result of finding people trying to infiltrate their countries, foreign countries will also block holidays or real opportunities for those who have already planned their studies or work.

This was stated, with the firm voice of someone who has to sound reassuring even in front of a Canadian microphone, by the Kenyan Deputy Minister of Labour, Shadrack Mwadime.

He was in Canada – the land of maple leaves, regulated smiles and dreams of hard currency – to try to open up official channels of employment for Kenyans who have skills but don't know where to use them.

Mwadime said that more and more of his compatriots are leaving with a tourist visa and a dream of becoming a labourer, convinced that a one-way ticket is enough to change their lives. But sometimes they only end up changing airports.

“A tourist visa will not guarantee you a job,” he said in the tone of someone who knows he is talking to a generation that no longer listens. “A work permit will.”

The problem, as always, is not leaving, but returning. Or worse: not being able to afford to return. Because behind every promise of work in Europe or the Middle East there is often a “good word” agent, a glittering advertisement on Facebook, or a relative of a friend of a cousin who “has already been there and settled down”.

The warning, incidentally, comes at a time when at least four Kenyan citizens have been arrested on the front lines of the war in Ukraine by the Kiev army, who found them wearing Russian uniforms, which were not souvenirs bought on Red Square, but evidence of full-fledged enlistment.

How could this have happened? The trailblazer, or rather the “hare” to use an athletics term, was a certain Evans, a marathon runner who had obtained a visa to participate in a competition. Prompted by a supposed agent, the Kenyan was convinced that he could obtain a work permit to stay longer where vodka replaces Kenya Cane.

“Sign here” in Cyrillic, and he found himself enlisted in Donbass.

Shortly thereafter, three other Kenyan “tourists” were found in similar situations, and the hunt for human traffickers in Nairobi began.

According to him, the government now wants to bring order to this jungle of hopes and scams, of which the matryoshka-shaped one is the most striking.

It wants to regulate, monitor, verify, strengthen and incentivise. All fine verbs that make a lot of noise at press conferences but little dust on the streets of Nairobi.

But Mwadime swears that something is happening: agencies to be monitored, bilateral agreements to be signed, incentives for those who work abroad and want to invest in their homeland — perhaps in a house they will only see on WhatsApp.

“We don't want our young people to be cheated,” he said.

And how can you blame him? No one wants to be taken for a ride. But in a country where even hope has a market price, those who have little often pay twice: first to leave, not on foot or on a boat, but with an economy ticket, then to realise that there was no paradise waiting for them on arrival.

So, while the government promises “safe and legal” routes, Kenyans continue to dream of becoming illegal immigrants: tourists of illusion, with suitcases full of CVs and the address of a future that does not respond. And the embassies of the countries that should host them are, rightly, becoming increasingly doubtful and selective.