Pirates of Somalia by Jay Bahadur Page A

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 steady high over the course of a day makes khat as expensive and luxurious a plant as medieval saffron. So prohibitive is the cost that I was continually baffled by the round-the-clock crowds chewing in the streets, against a backdrop of poverty and squalor; the steady influx of pirate dollars in recent years seemed the easiest explanation. Indeed, piracy has weighted so much of the daily economic life in Puntland towards the buying, bargaining, and bartering of khat that Puntlanders would perhaps do well to junk their near-worthless currency and adopt one based on the “khat standard.”
    On top of its numerous other negative effects, khat is a huge drain on Somalia’s foreign exchange holdings, sending hundreds of millions of US dollars per year to Kenya and Ethiopia at the expense of domestic investment; 10 it was for this reason that former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre tried extensively (and hopelessly) to stamp out khat use in the 1980s. Piracy, which is one of Puntland’s best foreign exchange earners, ultimately does little to improve economic opportunity on the ground, because pirate ransoms are continually recycled back into international markets via khat and Land Cruiser purchases.
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    Though ubiquitous amongst the local people, khat use is generally viewed by Somali expats as a sordid and disreputable activity, and many consider it