AW, our Baltimore friend is in the news again from Somalia
Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2012 11:51 pm
This time in the LA Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld ... ory?page=1
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld ... ory?page=1
The bank's owner and co-organizer of the event, Liban Egal, a Somali American from Baltimore, acknowledges that the war-torn country doesn't yet have the laws and courts to allow his bank to expand and lend money. In fact, it's losing $20,000 a month, losses he says he can sustain for perhaps six months.
The bank's biggest overhead cost is security, in a city where anyone important never goes anywhere without a couple of dozen security guards. At the moment, Egal, 43, is pitching to small and medium-size businesses, hoping to handle their payrolls and other accounting matters.
And for businesspeople, there is an upside here: There are no taxes or state interference.
As Egal talks, gunfire explodes a couple of streets away and rattles on for 10 minutes. He ignores it, as though it was a neighbor's annoying barking dog.
Egal set up his first business, a fried-chicken joint, in a part of Baltimore he says was so bad that he had no competition. He realized that he actually enjoyed risk.
He's gone from small risks, like losing $5,000 or $6,000 a month in his Baltimore small financing company, to huge ones, like opening the bank in Mogadishu. He also started an Internet server and a research company.
"When I came in August [2011], when Shabab had just left and the city was empty, I decided to do this project, the Internet and the bank. People thought I was crazy, because at the time Shabab was very powerful. But I could see at the time that the tide was turning.
"I'm a risk-taker. I've noticed some people have no tolerance for even losing $10. They cry like someone died. I didn't have a problem. That's why I took the risk of coming here so early."
Egal has little confidence that the political path will be smooth, but says as long as the African Union peacekeeping forces in Mogadishu maintain security and the new government brings in a legal framework, businesses will flourish and governance will slowly improve.
Jama, his fellow entrepreneur, is still working to convince his wife the place is safe. But he's sure that he'll eventually win her over.
"I feel like it's going to be better and I feel like it's going to be soon," he said. "Miami Beach wasn't built in a day.
"You can come back next year, without guards."
He is playing with fire and attracting too much attention. He doesn't realize that most of the foreign journalists there are a 3rd rate cast who failed every where and are trying to make it in MOG city. During my stay, I met all kinds of weird journalists like Alysha Rui VOA, Jeffrey Gettlemen NY Times, and so on. They wanted to do a piece on me, what I was doing and why I was in Somalia. I told them no thanks ! I liked my anonymity. These journalists are starving for stories and now the mantra is to peddle this "Everything is fine/Feel good" story because it has traction. You don't see them writing about the low level insurgency brewing, interTFG blood fueds, massive corruption in AMISOM, the Turkish land grabs, the destruction of the Jaziira coast line from sandmining, and constant AS inflitration of Xamar etc.