“In 20 years it will look like Dubai,” said Liban Bogor from the front seat. We were bumping over the rubble in a Toyota land cruiser at 10mph, returning from a feedlot on the outskirts of Bosaso, a port town on the Horn of Africa. Bogor is an influential local “businessman,” and around here that usually means a warlord, but I struggled to share his optimism. We passed youths carrying Kalashnikovs and children playing on trucks with mounted .50-calibre machine guns. Dubai it is not.
Bosaso is a hardscrabble Somalian town. The economy, such as it is, depends on the export of goats across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen. The beach is a vast latrine. In huts on the edge of Bosaso live refugees from Ethiopia and war-torn southern Somalia. Some of them try the crossing to Yemen; many die in doing so.
When our plane touched down in the town after a five-hour flight from Nairobi, we emerged to be greeted by men chewing the narcotic qat as they slouched over their AK-47s. They were not a friendly bunch. “Don’t take any more pictures of them,” an Australian mercenary with local knowledge warned us.
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