Nairobi Notebook

Khat Dependency

It is bitter, requires hours of dedicated chewing and leaves less food on the kids' dinner plates, but khat is the love of nearly every man throughout the Horn of Africa, Somaliland included. The reality is that it is less of a love and more of an addiction. Chewing khat provides an amphetamine like high. It's the Prozac of this part of the world. Of course that's not how it is seen in Hargeisa where alcohol is abhorred and hard drugs are non-existent. No, here the men here will try and tell you it is an integral part of life.

Every day at 10am the trucks arrive from Ethiopia where khat is a lucrative cash-crops for farmers living in a country where aid agencies say millions of children are at risk from famine this year. The money involved is phenomenal. It's thought - hard figures are hard to come by - that Somalialand's men spend some $300,000 a day on khat. Given this is one of the most impoverished regions in the world it's hard to work out where the cash comes from. There simply isn't $2,000,000 in weekly lose cash floating around here.

For men, the day revolves around chewing. Government ministries empty at 1pm sharp, so to do private businesses and cafes. The working day is effectively over. Aid workers joke that politicians are at their most productive whilst chewing...this is when the real negotiations take place. For the unemployed khat is a means to escape the drudgery of life and chew their way to an over-stimulated oblivion.

For women khat is the greatest curse and one of the main reasons their husbands don't bother seeking work. Their husbands pathetically argue they chew becasue they have no jobs. It's a convenient excuse that leaves many wives simmering with anger and contempt for their husbands. But they have few alternatives other than to work fifteen hours a day to support the family.

Some scientists say there is a link to impotence - could be the best antidote for polygamy!

Starbucks Kaldi's Style

I spotted this coffee-house logo as I walked down Addis Ababa’s Bole Road. “Shit! Starbucks has arrived in Africa”, I thought. I went inside where I was still in Starbucks, from the menu board above the counter with its cappuccinos and frappacinos coming ‘short’ and ‘tall’ to the green-aprons complete with logo worn by the staff. Even the artwork and red faux-leather sofas had Starbucks written all over them. Worse of all the coffee tasted like Starbucks coffee…in Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee. How wrong!

But it wasn’t Starbucks, it was Kaldi’s, a local coffee-house. The clientele were well-heeled locals and ex-pats. My initial surprise was not so much that Starbucks might have finally decided to crack the African market but that it would chose Addis Ababa to do so.

You may remember a rather bitter spat last year between Starbucks and the Ethiopian government who wanted to brand three of their most famous coffee names: Yirgacheffe, Hara and Sidhamo. Starbucks started flexing its muscles, lobbying heavily in the US for such a move to be blocked. Oxfam led the vilification of Starbucks and the media – always one to enjoy a multi-billion dollar making multinational company trying to screw over an impoverished African country – jumped on the bandwagon. It was a PR disaster for Starbucks and they executed an overdue U-turn.

Perhaps Kaldi's was around before all this kicked off. The fact that Kaldi's continues to rip-off the logo mere demonstrates the global lure of Starbucks even in a country it tries hard to exploit.