The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [43]
These numbers, however, are from the pre-piracy era. How might they look in 2011? Attempting to gauge piracy’s effect on khat sales in Puntland, I spoke to three Garowe-based merchants. The first was the aforementioned Fadumo, a bored-looking middle-aged woman with stylish beige sunglasses pushed up on the headdress of her fuchsia guntiino (a garment similar to a sari). My second conversation was with a pair of close friends in their late twenties, Maryan and Faiza, who owned side-by-side stalls in the khat suq. (I later discovered that Maryan—probably the most stunning Somali woman I had ever seen—was a member of Garaad’s rumoured harem of wives, a fact she admitted with an embarrassed giggle, asking how I had learned of it.)9
Fadumo worked long hours, from ten in the morning until ten at night. Her most profitable period was from one to three in the afternoon, when government employees got off work; four o’clock, the time that construction workers finished their day, heralded another mini rush hour. Her best days came at the end of the month, when soldiers were paid, and the two or three times per year that Puntland’s parliament was in session. “When there’s an election, that’s the very best time,” she said, because each candidate would arrive with a large entourage in tow, filling Garowe’s hotels to capacity.
When asked how piracy had affected her sales, Fadumo shot me an incredulous look, as if the answer were self-evident. “Most pirates spend money on three things: khat, alcohol, and women,” was her reply. “Also, very young people chew it now,” she added.
Fadumo estimated that the booming khat suq provided a livelihood to over two hundred vendors. One reason for the abundance of merchants is that launching a khat business requires no capital outlay; distributors are happy to supply a new vendor on consignment. “Only one and a half years ago,” Fadumo said, “khat suppliers were coming and knocking at our doors, begging us to be sellers. Now there are too many dealers … the market is flooded with them.” Back then, there would be days when she would only earn 20,000 to 30,000 shillings ($0.60–$0.90) profit, and occasionally she would not have any customers at all. At the time I interviewed her in June 2009, her gross revenue for an average day had risen to about $550–$600, of which Fadumo kept $100–$110 of profit. There was so much competition, she told me, that in order to get a high-quality product she had to be proactive; on many days she would travel up to thirty kilometres outside of Garowe to intercept the earliest shipments before they reached the city.
Kenyan khat was far more popular with her customers, and Fadumo did not even bother to stock the Ethiopian variety. The same went for Maryan and Faiza. “People say mirra [Kenyan khat] gets you in a better mood,” explained Faiza.
Piracy had also made a big difference to Maryan’s and Faiza’s balance sheets.
“The men have more money,” Maryan said. “They buy larger amounts and they don’t ask for loans.”
“We’ve had a lot of problems with loans in the past,” said Faiza. “They take the khat from you when they can’t afford it, and they won’t pay you back.”
“The pirates pay in cash, nothing less,” said Maryan, smiling broadly.
While men are the exclusive consumers of khat, those who sell it to them are almost exclusively women. According to Maryan, the collapse of the central state had forced Somali women to be more self-reliant. “The men are mainly unemployed,” said Maryan, “and the women have been forced to earn money to pay the bills, school fees, and things like that. They have to work to survive. Khat is a very reliable source of income.”
Perhaps one reason for its reliability is the fact that its price remains remarkably stable. But in a city where a cappuccino costs twenty-five cents, and where the majority of residents have no steady job, the twenty dollars required to maintain a