By Haroun Mahmud
Earlier this year, the BBC reported the story of a thirteen-year-old boy with a passion for making electronic toys. The story would have been fairly unremarkable – and otherwise rather typical – were it not for the unique circumstances of the boy’s life.
Guled Adan Abdi is from the northern town of Buhoodle, in the ‘Ayn’ region of Somalia, a country – which for the last twenty-five years – has been synonymous with the destructive forces of civil war and disorder. Guled’s story was all the more extraordinary for that; that despite all the possible innumerable factors that could curtail his curiosity and inhibit his creativity, he sought to use his mind to produce something, driven by the inquisitiveness intrinsic to any child of his age the world over.
He told the BBC Somali Service that “I started making toys when I was younger”, assembling plastic toys from bits of discarded objects and then working out how to motorise them by studying real cars. “I used to play with them without any motor”, he recounted, “But later, I said to myself, ‘Why don’t you make them into a moving machine?’ So I looked at the cars in the town and invented my toys with the same design.”
When he was interviewed in January 2016, his inventions included four electronic toys, including a truck and a plane, mainly using plastic from old cooking oil containers. He has also created a fan that can also be used as a light at night. Guled’s family situation is typical of war-torn region; he lives at home with his mother and siblings (an older brother and sister) and his father disappeared fourteen years ago in 2002 and is presumed dead. This leaves his mother struggling to support the family, selling anjeera (Somali pancakes) and when things get tough financially, the family sometimes has to stay with relatives in a remote area from which Guled cannot go to school.
“I have never seen anyone make such things and I was not trained by anyone. I investigated and found out for example how a car’s tyres turn.” To get the toys to move, he connects them to a battery-powered control box, which is marked with a plus and minus sign. If it is switched to minus, the car will move backwards and if you move the switch to the plus, it will go forwards.”
Since the toys are fashioned from rubbish, the only things he has to pay for are the batteries which cost around 25 American cents (the equivalent of 17 British pence) for a pair.
Guled is a local hero
After a day at school, which concludes at midday, Guled spends his time from noon to late in the evening working on his inventions.With his popularity growing, people come along in the afternoon to give him encouragement and watch him at work. His achievements have won him heartfelt support from his mother, Maryan Hassan, who was not initially keen on his obsession, sometimes even throwing away his model cars that were cluttering up their home. Now, she is proud of her son who she believes is a genius.
His fame has spread beyond Buhoodle after his teacher told the local authorities about her pupil. He was subsequently asked to travel 270km to Garowe, the main town of Somalia’s semi-autonomous Puntland region. He was received at the state house of Puntland’s President Abdiweli Mohamed Ali, who promised that the government would fund his education. Looking forward, the teenager admitted his ambitions are not limited to models, saying, “I would like to gradually learn how to become a producer of cars”.
But while Guled’s tale is enduring and heart-warming, it indicates some integral and indisputable traits of Somali people: those of intuition, adventurousness and resourcefulness. These very characteristics have propelled Somalis around the world – from the stallholder in Mogadishu’s bustling Bakara market district to the chief executive of an international money transfer company – to successfully establish and maintain prosperous businesses. Many of these success stories – premier examples of diligence and endurance – often slip the barrel of international news agencies’ cameras – more accustomed as they are to showcasing the façade of decayed, bullet-ridden buildings and signs of destitution and despair.
Somalian entrepreneurship
In Eastleigh, for example, a formerly rather dishevelled eastern suburb of Kenyan capital Nairobi, Somali businesspeople provided much-needed regeneration, creating everything from stalls to shopping malls and night lodges. The products on offer range from groceries to designer clothing and jewellery, with goods imported tax-free from Dubai via Eldoret in western Kenya and trucked to Eastleigh. The area is almost entirely inhabited by Somalis – earning it the label ‘Little Mogadishu’ – with the commercial sector likewise being dominating by Somalis, whose contributions account for over $1.5 billion. The Somali presence is particularly robust, with Eastleigh accounting for around a quarter of Nairobi City Council’s tax revenues in September 2015. Around the same time, Hassan Guleid, chairman of the Eastleigh Business District Association, said the neighbourhood turned over more than $100 million a month.
Somali money transfer companies operate across the world, helping people to send money back home to family. Dahabshiil (Somali for “gold smelter”) is the largest such organisation, with 24,000 agent locations worldwide and over forty years’ experience. It employs more than 2,000 people across 126 countries. Owing to its reliability and reputation – British Prime Minister David Cameron spoke up for the firm when Barclays closed its bank account in 2013 – most of the major international development organisations operative in Somalia use Dahabshiil to transfer funds, including the UN, WHO, World Bank, Oxfam, Save the Children and Care International. Its success in shuttling money from Minnesota to Mogadishu and Gothenburg to Garowe has meant it is now beginning to diverse its services, establishing in early 2009 an Islamic bank which provides clients with Shariah-compliant financing. Nine other money transfer operators (MTOs) also provide competition; Amal Express for example has assets totalling more than $30 million and a capital base of over $5 million.
Such ingenuity is prevalent among Somalis, wherever they hail from, from Mogadishu or the self-declared independent regions of Somaliland and Puntland. Just this month, Ismail Ahmed, CEO and founder of an online money transfer service WorldRemit, was recognised by Ernst & Young, one of the world’s big four audit firms as overall EY Entrepreneur of the Year for London. The company earned revenue in 2015 of $35.8 million and expects significant growth in the near future, in particular due to the large expansion of the American market.
There are countless other stories of Somalis, who lived in the diaspora for decades busy with studying and working, who return home to bring their technical knowledge and expertise to bear in the revival of dulka Hooyo (the motherland). In the early- to mid-twentieth century, Eastern European Jews, fleeing the ravages of war and persecution, found themselves excluded from most industries in their host communities in London and similar cities due to deep-seated xenophobia. They capitalised on their history as entrepreneurial middlemen and the financial opportunities offered by their host community. Similarly, Somalis, when they fled civil war in the late twentieth-century, found many forms of employment in their adopted homelands closed to them, often by virtue of language barriers or their qualifications being unrecognised, so turning to what they know best – entrepreneurship.
Somalis – an ingenious people
This led to a renewed security across the capital and elsewhere, so the demand for properties and accommodation far exceeds the supply, raising rental prices three-fold in the central and prime areas. High-rise buildings are replacing bullet-ridden and dilapidated ones. “Retail estate is booming in Mogadishu”, Mursal Mak said,a British-Somali property developer, who left Somalia in 1987 and returned 22 years later.. “This evening, I had a meeting with a client and he said, ‘Mogadishu is becoming like Manhattan or central London; you are talking credible prices when it comes to property’. When I came here in 2009, I leased a property with a value of $600,000 (£370,000) for $300 a month, but now the property is being rented for $4,500 a month.”
Omar Osman, who resided in America for more than 20 years, also returned. With a business partner, he set up a commercial bank, First Somali Bank and with funding from the bank, they set up an internet company, Somalia Wireless, an industry in which they saw an opening, with growing demand for connectivity from the private sector. “When we first arrived in Mogadishu, internet penetration was less than one percent”, says Osman. “Now we have coverage throughout the city, with the exception of some areas where connection is still patchy, but we are working on that”.
With sky-rocketing property prices and flowing capital, the hospitality industry is also receiving a boost. In the summer of 2008, 42-year-old chef Ahmed Jama left London to return and live in Mogadishu, where he was born. Having come to Britain in the 1980s, after studying a cooking course in Birmingham and encouraged by his landlady who recognised his cooking talent, he started opening restaurants to cater for the thousands of Somalis living in London who did not have Somali restaurants to visit. After opening a number of restaurants in London, he opened a franchise of his trademark Village restaurant in Mogadishu and was the subject of a TEDx talk, entitled ‘Why I returned from London to start restaurants in Somalia: Ahmed Jama Mohamed’ . Now, his upmarket restaurant on one of the best-guarded roads in the city Makkah-al-Mukarramah Street (although occasionally targeted by bomb blasts) serves everything from a fillet of kingfish (caught that very morning) grilled over charcoal and enlivened with a light green-chilli sauce to soor (sorghum mash) and camel meat. He even had an espresso machine flown in from Europe, which weighed nearly 100 kilos. Realising it used up a fortune’s worth in electricity bills, an engineer Jama knew resourcefully replaced the electronics with a charcoal-run system.
It is clear – from the story of young Guled in Buhoodle with his remarkable electronic toy inventions to the founders of upmarket restaurants and multi-million money transfer companies – that Somalis have an intrinsic ingenuity. With elections just around the corner due to take place this at the end of this year, one can only hope that an incoming government will demonstrate the audacity and resourcefulness, which is so evident among its people and which will turn a once failed state into a success story and a beacon for the whole world to admire. In the famous and often-recited words of the first national anthem of Somalia, one can only say: ‘Soomaaliyeey toosoo’ [O Somalia, wake up and rise!]
Haroun Mahmud
Email: [email protected]
—
This article was also published on Journ Africa. The author is a student at Cambridge university, UK.
We welcome the submission of all articles for possible publication on WardheerNews.com. WardheerNews will only consider articles sent exclusively. Please email your article today . Opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of WardheerNews.
WardheerNew’s tolerance platform is engaging with diversity of opinion, political ideology and self-expression. Tolerance is a necessary ingredient for creativity and civility.Tolerance fuels tenacity and audacity.
WardheerNews waxay tixgelin gaara siinaysaa maqaaladaha sida gaarka ah loogu soo diro ee aan lagu daabicin goobo kale. Maqaalkani wuxuu ka turjumayaa aragtida Qoraaga loomana fasiran karo tan WardheerNews.
Copyright © 2024 WardheerNews, All rights reserved
