Nairobi Notebook

Mutual Respect

The call to prayer in Hargeisa leads to a mass exodus from the city's cafes, places of work and the market. Nothing remarkable there, but what is incredible is the law and order that prevails in the eerily empty city centre. Nobody feels the need to lock up their wares. The currency exchangers who I wrote about the other day leave their thick wodges of Somaliland Shillings piled high on their tables (admittedly any dollars and euro are most likely under lock and key), market vendors leave their stalls unattended while cafe owners leave their kitchens wide open. In Nairobi, in fact any other city I have ever travelled to, bricks of cash worth hundreds of dollars left unwatched would disappear in seconds. And in Hargeisa we are talking about a city where perhaps as many as 90% of men are unemployed, destitute and need of cash to buy the next bundle of khat.

Why on earth doesn't someone run and grab? People can explain the sins of theft and quote from the koran until they are blue in the face, I still don't understand why desperate people here don't steal.

More than anything else it is I admit rather a sorry indictment of western values and morals that I consider this display of mutual respect for one's property so remarkable.

Passport to Nowhere

One intriguing, unusual problem that citizens of the breakaway republic of Somaliland face is which passport to carry. Under the Somaliland constitution they are required to travel on a Somaliland passport. But there is a snag: the international community has for the last 17 years refused to recognise Somaliland as an independent, sovereign State. In the eyes of international law this isolated, impoverished, yet relatively stable region of the Horn of Africa remains a part of Somalia. Present a Somaliland passport to any immigration officer and he will send you back in the direction you arrived.

I am told this is exactly what happened to President Dahir Rayale Kahin in the United States a couple of years back.

The other option is to hold a Somali passport. This however is illegal under Somaliland law. But a Somali passport is desperately easy to get hold of. At various roadside junctions in central Hargeisa currency vendors sit at battered metal containers piled high with brick-size wedges of Somaliland shillings, US dollars and Euros. Wedged into these stacks of cash are Somali passports.   

“We sell these passports because our government is not recognised, so if we want to do business outside Somaliland we have to use this document”, 26 year old Hussein told me flicking through the front pages of a pristine Somali passport. Adding ones details is no sweat – simply glue a photo over the box that says ‘picture’ and fill in your details by hand. A minister’s signature is required from Mogadishu – if indeed there is a Minister of Immigration -but that is easily circumvented.

“We just forge the signature”, Hussein said nonchalantly.
 
“And the Somaliland officials turn a blind eye?” I asked. “Of course they do”, smiled Hussein, “They have to travel on these passports too”.

So, should you want one, for $42 a Somali passport is yours on the streets of Hargeisa

Rain from the South

Today I took a crash course in rain forecasting from 65 year old Muhumed Qalinle Aare. Aare lives in the village of Laaya deep in the Somaliland bush. His people are pastoralists and depend on his predictions.

Rain forecasting is a developed art among nomadic herders in the Horn and East Africa. Its origins, I am told, lie in a combination of Persian and African astronomy.I am not sure if I really got to grips with the subject but here is my understanding of how it is done. The first clue lies in the day of the week New Year, Nayruus, falls on. This year it was a Tuesday...not a good omen. For those with even the most basic grasp of science, this seems far from convincing. But then it gets more complicated.

In each month of the year there is a period of seven days when a certain set of stars should be aligned. Where exactly in the month these seven days fall is determined by the positioning of another star. In western Somaliland the first rains of the year are expected in late March. So, if in January the stars are aligned during the said period of seven days the March rains can be expected on time. Single men are advised to go forth and find a wife as it is set to be a bountiful year! If the stars are not aligned then alarm bells ring. If the same stars are aligned during February's seven day period and the wind is blowing from the south (Ithink!) then it is panic over. If not, then the rains are set fail...as is happening this year. Capiche.

Clearly there is more to the art than that. After all it takes years to acquire "the knowledge" to read the skies. The rest I fear was lost in translation. Aare can't say for now if and when the rains will arrive. After all they are "very disturbed" this year. But looking at this chart (above) produced by the Famine Early Warning Network, Aare's predictions at the start of the year are proving accurate. Just 10-50 percent of the expected rainfall has fallen over Somaliland in the last two months.

I asked Aare whether global warming is making it harder to predict weather patterns. Surely, in this day and age of green house gases and climate change the calculations that his great-grandfather applied no longer work. Aare quickly raised a finger. "Man is too weak to alter the skies. Only Allah has the power".

Shame. Religion trumps science and for me the mystery of rain forecasting unravells.

Hargeisa: Brief History

Egal International Airport - little more than a pot-holed asphalt airstrip on the outskirts of Hargeisa - looks architecturally like a post-war British airfield. Walk through into the "arrivals lounge" and there hanging on the wall is a bronze plaque declaring that "This building was opened by HRH Duke of Gloucester in 1958" - just two years before Somaliland became the third African country to  gain independence from the British. It was for a few days an independent state before forming a union with neighbouring Somalia, a former Italian colony...a move Somaliland has since regretted and, it the mind of its people reversed, but which the international community seems hell bent on continuing to enforce.

Thick clouds of cigarette smoke and loud, animated conversation filled the immigration hall. Waiting for me with a grin that exposed his three gold-plated front teeth was Yassin, better known as Yankee Kilo in Hargeisa circles. He grabbed my passport, ordered me to sit and duly returned five minutes later with the visa. Normally on this continent a country with few visitors charges top dollar for a visa. Not Somaliland, though, which demands an almost apologetic $20. From there I was shown towards a Toyota Landcruiser and onto Hargeisa's roads that don't appear to have seen a new layer of bitumen since the civil war.

The city of Hargeisa was razed to the ground during the late 1980s as Somali forces loyal to the military dictator Siad Barre repressed Somaliland's bid for renewed independence. 95 percent of Hargeisa's  population fled across  neighbouring  borders. They could only return in 1991 when Barre was toppled and Somalia began its descent into state-collapse.

Hargeisa needed re-building from scratch. The West turned its back on Somaliland, which turned to the diaspora for help. Many of the people on board my Ethiopian Airlines flight had connected through Addis Ababa from the US. "For a family to survive you have to have a family member abroad" my neighbour Abib told me. He set up the first remittance agency in the US for Somalilanders and  said the diaspora in the states sends home some $7 million a month.

Hargeisa is now bustling city of one million people, or at least it is in the mornings and evenings. In the afternoon it is like a ghost-town. Empty. All the men are inside chewing Khat, a mild natural stimulant...but I'll save khat and the colour of Hargeisa for another day and leave today's post as a brief history to the city.  

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.

Hargeisa Bound

For much of the last week I have, I admit, been a little overzealous in my eagerness to take a bunny-hop tour of Somalia en route to Somaliland. What good fun to set down on Mogadishu tarmac for a few hours! This prospect did become somewhat less appealing with the news a couple of days ago that Islamic insurgents had lobbed mortars onto the airfield as the Somalia's President set off for "peace talks" in neighbouring Djibouti. Still, I wanted to see the coral waters and  white sand beaches  that fringe Somalia's ruined capital...not to mention a glimpse of the city itself.

But I must have been looking for an excuse to avoid the cattle-truck ride that "Daallo - The Pride of the Horn of Africa" provides. Safe(ish) by all accounts, but one hell of an unpleasant experience according to most. So the prospect of 24 hours, then 36 hours in Djibouti on my return (and it's a logical question to ask how Djibouti can be considered on the way back when it is north and Nairobi is south) was enough to persuade me to pull out a couple of extra hundred dollar bills.

So instead of a stomach churning cork-screw descent into Mog and a hot sweaty layover in Djibouti I will be enjoying the legacy of Italy's brutal occupation of Ethiopia, munching on pizza and enjoying a really good macchiato on the streets of Addis Ababa.

Right now I am watching a bunch of red-neck US marines unload a US Airforce Hercules...hard to make out what is coming out of the hold, except one burly chap has just walked out with a collection of toilet brushes. Sure they sold those in Nakumatt last time I looked!

Dead Capital

I was driving along Nairobi's Langata Road today. It seperates Kibera, a god-awful place, and Langata, a plush part of Nairobi that is home to  government ministers and the likes.

It got me thinking about the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto who has an interesting theory on title deeds in slum areas such as  Kibera slums. He puts forward a somewhat hypercapitalist argument that governments in the developing world should legalise their squatters. He argues that in doing so governments would liberate what he calls the “dead capital” inherent in their homes and automatically give them a place in the market economy. Slum dwellers would, he claims, have capital to offset loans against. De Soto talks of billions of dollars worth of unrealised capital that could lift slum residents out of their impoverished conditions.

In Kenya, slums like Kibera, which is commonly referred to as sub-Saharan Africa’s largest slum, were until the turn of this century not even recognised as formal settlements. Until the end of former President Daniel Arap Moi’s rule,  Kibera did not appear on maps of Nairobi, instead the settlement was marked as forest…nevermind the fact that Kibera is home to one million people.

I am not so sure de Soto's theory works in a place such as Kibera and in his book, Shadow Cities, author Robert Neuwirth raises certain points that I agree with. To start with, in Kibera the vast majority of residents are tenants and not landlords. Some landlords are wealthier slum dwellers, others are local big-men who over the years have grabbed land and put up decrepit mud-walled shacks knowing there is an insatiable demand for dirt-cheap housing. So who would get the title deed? The tenant or the landlord? And if the landlord then how exactly would those at the bottom of the pile benefit from this liberated capital?

Secondly, Nairobi’s slums are a hive of economic activity. It’s just informal and, most importantly to the residents, tax free. Spend five minutes in Kibera and you will meet women trading charcoal and vegetables, young men hawking anything from stolen mobile phones to second-hand clothing. I am not sure they would want to be above board and legal…that would mean paying taxes and probably put them out of business.

I am not an economist so would be interested in hearing people's thoughts...

Old Boys Club

Last year Kenyan MPs voted - overwhelmingly believe it or not - in favour of giving themselves a massive pay-rise. They are now some of the best paid parliamentarians in the world (probably the best if you work out their hourly salary given the pitiful amount of time they actually spend in the chamber), taking home close to one million shillings (some $15,000) a month in salary and allowances.

But today we learn from The Standard that they are not finished yet. Having looked after themselves MPs are now turning their attentions to their predecessors. Not just their immediate predecessors...the 345 million shilling secret "send-off" includes every living MP who has entered into office since Kenyan independence in 1963. The speaker of the house has called the payment a "token gesture of appreciation".

A token gesture maybe how the political elite in this country perceive such sums of money. But I doubt that's how the 18 million or so people who live on less than a dollar a day here will see it. So pity the Kenyan tax-payer who will have to foot the bill while trying to keep his above water as   the price of  oil soars, food prices  show no immediate sign of steadying and inflation skips past 20%.

And if this move by the old boys network isn't enough to make you shake your head with despair as the blood boils, then take a look at the direction Kenya's political leaders continue to take the fight against corruption. A parliamentary committee has laid its hands on a document detailing an amnesty deal between the Anti-Corruption Commission - located within the absurdly named Integrity House - and Kamlesh Pattni, one of Kenya's wealthiest businessmen and a principal scoundrel in the Goldenberg scandal. In return for immunity Pattni has had to surrender his luxurious Grand Regency Hotel. Big deal say many here, he financed the hotel
with millions of dollars stolen from the Kenyan economy in the first place.

When I interviewed the Anti-Corruption Commission's spokesman, Nicholas Simani, last year  he assured Kenyans they would see the  day when the "big fish" were held to account. You would assume that included the masterminds behind Goldenberg. The paper-trail is supposedly there but there is zero politcal will...plus ca change!

Safety in Numbers

It is official. Nairobi is a safe city. I don't base this on any official statistics becasue I haven't seen any. I couldn't tell you whether gun crime is down, nor if car-jackers are turning their minds to other activities. But what I can tell you is that the kapoors (an Indian family living in the flat below) are now taking their daily 'power-walk' OUTSIDE the electrified perimetre fence.

This is not a decision they will have taken lightly. When I arrived 18 months ago mother and daughter would everyday stride purposefully up and down the 20 metre car park, in their matching pink tracksuits, the daughter plugged in to some Bombay beats on her walkman. Every now and again they would mix it up a bit and take in a lap of the swimming pool - one can only imagine the monotony got to them. When I asked "why", they looked at me as if I was dicing with death each time I walked out the gates.

"You know it is dangerous out there (beyond the compound walls). You will be mugged. Better to stay inside". The Kapoors have lived in Nairobi for years and they remember the city's more violent days. Not long ago people would put Nairobi - then affectionately known as Nai-robbery - in the same bracket as Johannesburg...in other words an altogether un-savoury place where you didn't venture out on foot after dark and you ran all red lights unless you actively wanted to surrender your car.

But now the Kapoors walk a circuit on a neighbouring street. Ok, it's a gated road with two guards manning the barrier. But this surely is a sign of the times.

Nairobi has reached its tipping point.  

Satirical Relief

Reading the newspapers in Kenya often involves sifting through stories of murderous jilted lovers, acts of depraved pedophilia and pages of political reportage that consistently fail to take the country's politicians to task. Sure, press freedoms are not all they could be. You do not have to cast your mind too far back to recall the armed raids on the offices of the Standard Newspaper and Kenya Television Network which the  government supposedly ordered on the grounds of "protecting state security".  Perhaps the media has has less room in which to manoeuvre than might appear?

But if you want an example of someone willing to push the boundaries and indulge himself in political satire then check out GADO's sketches. GADO - real name Godfrey Mwampembwa - rarely fails to read between the lines and let his pencil do the talking. Take today's sketch (see left) over recent calls from certain quarters within the cabinet for an amnesty for those who committed all manner of heinous crimes during the post election violence. The speech bubble "my people need protection" says it all and anecdotal evidence says that protection could be needed higher up the political echelons than many Kenyans would like to accept.
 

What bugs me is why if GADO gets it can the reporters not say it, instead filling column inches with who will make up yet another commission of inquiry.

This is my favourite sketch of the year. It sums up perfectly the outcome to the political turmoil: more than a thousand lives lost for the sake of two egos being able to say they both won. At the time my friend Steve Bloomfield, who writes for The Independent, asked Raila Odinga why neither he nor Kibaki had been out to their constituencies to defuse the tension. His answer - something along the lines of 'there's nothing I can do' - was nauseating. This sketch said more than all the commentaries and analysis that filled the papers.

GADO's work is a breath of fresh air in a paper that aligns itself a little to closely to Kibaki for my liking.