GULF-KENYA

Governments across Africa, from Kenya to Uganda, have embraced the mass export of labor as an economic strategy. Kenya’s Labour Cabinet Secretary, Alfred Mutua, has proudly championed the goal of sending one million Kenyans abroad annually. The justification? Economic growth, reduced unemployment, and increased remittances. But behind this sanitized narrative is a much darker reality—one of abuse, exploitation, and, too often, death.

Between January 2020 and December 2022, at least 283 Kenyan migrant workers died in the Gulf, 185 of them in Saudi Arabia. These are just the recorded numbers. The uncounted, unreported, and disappeared? No one knows. Families receive vague explanations, or worse, silence. Postmortems rarely reveal the full picture. Some return in coffins, their bodies bearing signs of torture, starvation, or outright violence. Others vanish into the system, their fates sealed by confiscated passports and indifferent employers.

Kenya is not alone in this horror. Tanzanian women seeking work in Oman and the UAE have spoken of physical and sexual abuse, unpaid wages, and forced labor. Sierra Leonean and Ethiopian domestic workers in Lebanon live under the oppressive Kafala system, where employers wield near-total control over their lives. Across the Middle East, African workers tell strikingly similar stories of mistreatment, echoing the historical horrors of enslavement.

The exploitation doesn't end there. In New Delhi, thousands of Kenyan girls are trafficked for sex work. They are lured with promises of legitimate employment, only to find themselves trapped in brothels, their passports confiscated, and burdened with inflated debts. A recent investigation revealed that 14 Kenyan women were rescued from such a prostitution ring in India.

Despite these well-documented abuses, African governments continue to push labor migration, turning a blind eye to the brutal conditions. Why? Because it’s lucrative. Remittances inject billions into economies starved of jobs and opportunity. Worse still, the agencies facilitating these migrations—many of them owned or connected to government officials—profit directly from desperate young people signing up for what they are told will be a better life. Some of these agencies even trap workers in debt, forcing them to pay exorbitant fees just to leave, only to be enslaved once they arrive.

Kenya’s foreign policy—and Africa’s, for that matter—cannot be one where we give out our women and men as slaves in exchange for favors.

This cannot continue. The African Union (AU), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and other international bodies must stop treating labor migration as an inevitability and start addressing it as a crisis. The AU cannot remain silent while African citizens are trafficked and brutalized. It must demand accountability from governments that prioritize remittances over human lives. The UNHCR, which has long advocated for the protection of displaced people, must extend its focus to those being driven out by economic desperation and lured into abusive conditions abroad. These organizations, along with national governments, must push for binding agreements with destination countries that guarantee worker protections, enforceable labor rights, and the immediate shutdown of rogue recruitment agencies.

Most importantly, African governments must stop pretending they can “regulate” this industry while still actively fueling it. The solution is not to send more people away with flimsy promises of “safe migration” but to create viable opportunities at home. If they invested even half as much energy into job creation as they do into negotiating labor export deals, the continent’s young people would not be so easily exploited. Instead, they would have the opportunity to build dignified lives in their own countries, free from the dangers of modern-day slavery.

The real question is this: why are our leaders so determined to ship out their own youth, knowing full well that too many will never return? The African youth of today are not eager to be exported. They want good jobs at home, fair wages, and the chance to build their futures on their own soil. But instead of investing in industries, education, and entrepreneurship, governments take the easy way out—sending young people abroad, washing their hands of responsibility, and cashing in on their suffering.

It’s time to stop pretending this is anything but a crisis. The body count is too high. The stories of abuse are too many. This isn’t employment. It’s modern-day slavery, and Africa’s leaders are complicit. The AU, the UNHCR, and every African government that continues to allow this trade in human lives must act now to end this exploitation and protect their citizens.

Gem Musings is a seasoned International Relations and Public Affairs Strategist with extensive experience in global diplomacy, communication, and policy analysis.