Djibouti: Economic Miracle Without a Cause

by Ian Williams

Djibouti is an economic miracle. With no visible means of support, in the most infertile and arid territory conceivable, the country has a stable currency, tied to the dollar for over 20 years, and manages to feed not only its own people, but thousands of refugees as well. Djibouti is a member of the Arab League, and, along with French, Arabic is an official language. However the majority of its people are either Somalis or Afars, a related people, and its government works in French.

While its claims to Arabness may be pushing at the limits, they are not completely without foundation. There is a significant Yemeni population in the eponymous capital city, Djibouti, and for a long time the Red Sea has been as much a pathway as a barrier for relations between Yemen and the Horn of Africa. The Somali talent for languages and the power of Islam means that the majority of Djiboutians can speak Arabic, certainly enough to understand my limited attempts and to get me the reputation in at least one sprawling housing project as the Ferenghi who could.

But Djibouti’s parlous economic base means it needs every alliance it can keep. A French former aid worker at Djibouti airport summed it up lugubriously. “By the time the French came here, humans had moved to most parts of the worldexcept Antarctica and Djibouti.” Djibouti has almost zero rainfall, the hottest temperatures in one of the hottest continents, and also boasts the lowest point in it, the very pit of the Rift Valley.

Although there were indeed some very small coastal towns when the French arrived, they were not interested in the non-existent natural resources. They were interested in shadowing the British, who 10 years before had set up shop in Aden to consolidate the Suez route between India and Europe. Ever since, the Djibouti territory’s main industry has been servicing the French bases there.

Apart from a few Afars in the north, the people who were around when the French disembarked were mostly Somali nomads, so the enclave became known as French Somalilandto distinguish it from British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland to the south. When Somalia approached independence, and as the British were being shuttled out of Aden, the French were less eager to give up their base. They renamed their colony “The French Territory of the Afars and Issas.” The majority Issas were in fact a Somali clan, while the Afars were a related people, whose fears of Somali domination Paris played upon to try to delay independence, and to fend off any attempt at reunification with Somalia. The small Yemeni community were politically insignificant.

When the French reluctantly conceded independence in 1977, the country was named Djibouti, after the port city the French had built. Independence was manifested in that peculiar French way that means the civil service was dominated by French advisers and the Djiboutians could have any government they liked as long as it did what Paris told them. And there was little the independence leader President Hassan Gouled Aptidon could do about it, since any move to federate with Somalia would have guaranteed an Ethiopian invasion. The rail line to Djibouti was one of Addis Ababa’s crucial links to the ocean, certainly too crucial to be left in hostile Somali hands.

Born of Political Expedience

So, in a country carved out of one of the driest deserts by political expedience, the half-million Djiboutians have had to manufacture an economy. Roughly one-third of their income comes from the French base, permanent home of a Foreign Legion detachment. Another third comes from the port and rail line to Ethiopia, and the rest from foreign aid, which the Djiboutians have been extraordinarily adept at getting, so much so that many aid agencies think that the Djiboutian recipients cannot actually handle what they already have in the way of aid projects.

Perhaps typical was the orphanage that I visited. Funded by Saudi Arabia, its children were clean, well fed, and seemed happy. Its large, elaborate kitchen was immaculate, but empty. Faced with a shortage of spare parts, the gas ranges were idle and the cooking was done in vast cauldrons perched on rocks over wood fires.

Less impressive was the fisheries project. Backed by the U.N. Development Program, an advertising campaign was aimed at persuading the nomadic Djiboutians, accustomed to lunch walking on four legs, that fish were food. That was moderately successful, but the fish remain too expensive for most of the locals, and end up on the tables of expatriates.

The beach was like an archeological site for well-meaning aid projects. The most expensive mooring post on the coast was a large diesel engine donated by USAID in more generous times that the recipients could not afford to run. Nearby were large fishing boats with cracked fiber-glass hulls that were abandoned for the same reason. The fishermen in smaller boats brought their catch to the “cooperative” that was owned by the government and leased to a private French company. The fishermen themselves were kept at bay by police and barred gates. Eloquently, one of them whispered, “At sea, we fish for sharks and then we come ashore and have to deal with them again.”

Even more depressing was the housing project that was building soulless concrete coops over cesspits blasted out of solid rock which the soil survey had overlooked just a few inches below the surface. Apparently the designers saw no reason why these people should have sewers when no else in the country did.

In spite of these depressing aspects, Djiboutians are remarkably cheerful people. The brightly clad market women seem to run everything not connected with the government. They sit in the market quoting prices for every currency in the region, even Somaliland shillings. Despite the huge fistfuls of bank-notes they clutch in their hands, robbery seems unheard of.

However, they also sell qat. Every day, a Russian jet lands in Djibouti at around noon, and is the focus of a flurry of activity unusual in the sleepy territory. It is filled with qat twigs, whose leaves have to be chewed within 24 hours to keep their potency. Within hours the planeload is on the streets of Djibouti, held under damp hemp sacks to keep it fresh. The mildly narcotic but strongly addictive leaves take up to one-third of the country’s foreign exchange, and an equal proportion of the wages of the poor. “This stuff eats the poor,” declared one market woman, Zara, as she brandished a fistful of twigs at me. Many women like her relied upon their slender profits on sales to keep their families fed, even as other breadwinners were diverting the bread money to qat.

Civil war with the Afars has now been settled, but the government, never exactly liberal in its approach to opposition, has been increasingly repressive toward the unions and opposing parliamentarians. As the octogenarian President Aptidon’s health fails, the succession may well cause problems and, unusually, the French have been hedging their bets. During the recent strikes, the French military refused to take over from the striking civilian air traffic controllers. Incidentally, adding new dimensions to the phrase “opiate of the people,” the government ensured that the qat plane flew in anyway, without control.

With the French military downsizing, hopes of an economic roleindeed of an economyfor Djibouti hinge on the Port of Djibouti as a transshipment center for the Indian Ocean. Unfortunately there are many contenders, like Aden, some of which are better placed to take advantage of this growing opportunity. So, Djibouti will continue to be a fascinating geopolitical Arabo-Franco-Somali anomaly, and its people will continue be good-humored, and charming. But what they will live on will probably remain a mystery.