Kenya is not Phuket.
Thankfully.
Kenya is not Marsa Alam, Hurgada, Sharm El Sheikh.
Some will find it hard to believe: Kenya is not even Santo Domingo.
Kenya is not a tourist resort, it's a world.
And like all possible worlds, you can't enclose it in a glass dome with sand at the base, two little animals, a baobab mignon and the blue of the ocean colored in tempera.
If instead of a total reopening of travel and tourism, in Italy we are still talking about "covid free corridors", it is also normal that Kenya has nothing to do with these tour operator logics. Because Kenya doesn't have corridors, or dining rooms and checkrooms. Kenya is an immense open space, a florilegium of terraces overlooking immensity. This is probably one of the reasons why it was saved, like most of Africa, from the pandemic ecatomy predicted by the World Health Organization. Unfortunately, the same reasons are holding back its reopening by those who, like the Italian government, do not have much time to find out how people really live in this part of the universe and rely on the numbers of vaccinated people and the quality of the health service.
So let's start from the bottom: a state as it should, which has at heart the health but also the social life, the physical and mental well-being of its citizens, knowing that frustration and limitations of freedom are the basis of social discontent that then flows into violence of all kinds, youth discomfort and depression, would cancel immediately the "Fascia E", allowing anyone to decide where to go on vacation. At the same time, however, it would impose the obligation to take out a health insurance policy that would cover any unpleasant inconvenience. Because by now, as in Kenya so in almost all destinations frequented by tourists, private health care is at good levels, paying handsomely. But what has been happening for months now, and even more so since the beginning of winter? Italians have been nimbly circumventing controls, leaving for East Africa with or without insurance, risking more this way than with open borders. Also because, if something were to happen to them, they would find themselves in the position of not being in compliance and some insurance companies may even refuse to pay, while others will not agree to underwrite anything if they know that the destination of the trip is a forbidden country.
In this sense, and we return to the first issue, the vaccination issue for travelers becomes secondary, because since Kenya requires those arriving from the West to have the Green Pass and its own citizens to show it before leaving the country, they have put important stakes.
Then there is the issue of social classes. If the numbers say that there are 11 million currently vaccinated and about 6 million with vaccine passport, we must also know the economic reality of Kenya. The rich, that is, people who can travel abroad for pleasure, slightly exceed 2 million, and they are all vaccinated. Proof was seen at Christmas, when in the hotels and lodges of level in Kenya there were no cancellations by local customers because of the obligation to show the vaccine certificate. Added to this are workers in the health, public and tourism sectors. Everyone else will probably never get vaccinated, partly because Kenya's High Court has ruled against mandatory vaccination. But these are almost exclusively populations that very rarely can come into contact with Western tourists and that, except in exceptional cases, will never travel abroad.
So if the Italian fear was not to be able then to control the flow and return of compatriots and find themselves infected by who knows what other variant Bantu, the problem is virtually null, are our leaders to have created and do not want to solve it, because the "escape from reality" even if only temporary of its citizens is not part of the priorities of the nation.
And we, who know the situation well, are faced with an obvious paradox: Kenya cannot be reopened because it has always been open.