Defying mayhem, Somali plans Coca-Cola venture

NAIROBI - Defying his broken country's many pessimists, a Somali businessman has unveiled plans to bottle Coca-Cola in chaotic Mogadishu, a city with no police, no insurance and only gun law.

The plant is built and the machinery ready to start up in late February or early March, an eye-catching display of nerve in a capital of one million roamed by an estimated 60,000 gunmen with rifles, truck-mounted machineguns and grenade launchers.

Somalia's AbdiRisak Isse said he was relying on the self-interest of the clan system to protect the plant, by drawing in partners from as wide a range of communities as possible.

"People think I'm either crazy, ambitious - or very smart," Isse, 37-year-old chairman of Somalia's United Bottling Company, said in an interview by telephone from the shell-cratered city.

"But I know when to take a chance. If I didn't do it now, someone else would."

The country has had no government since the 1991 overthrow of military ruler Mohammed Siad Barre. Militia feuding and famine have killed hundreds of thousands.

The country is so damaged that it is largely absent from UN development rankings. In many areas it is too dangerous for researchers to gather data on nutrition, education and health.

But Isse's venture in north Mogadishu's Towfiiq district is the latest evidence of renewed interest from the Somali diaspora in the capital's resurgent business and professional community.

The businessman, who holds a Swedish passport, returned from Sweden five years ago to try making money in his homeland. He has joined forces with other Somali investors to finance and build a 12,000 sq m factory to bottle what the Coca-Cola company likes to call the world's best known soft drink.

The business will revive a commercial link between the Horn of Africa country and the global brand that was cut when civil war engulfed the once-elegant capital in the early 1990s, killing off the last bottling plant.

The site will employ just 125 employees to fill some 30,000 bottles an hour, but Isse reckons it will lead to the creation of 5000 small kiosk businesses where the product will be sold.

"It means employment for the people and it is joblessness that creates insecurity, so I don't feel a threat from Somali society," said Isse. "I want other Somalis to also come back and invest in their country."

The past three years have seen a steady return of homesick middle-aged Somali professionals who spent their early careers overseas but now want to risk coming home, sensing the worst of the war is over and now is the time to take opportunities.

Isse is not worried that there is no government or police to call on if thirsty militiamen loot the site, or that, in common with many Somali firms, conventional insurance cover has been impossible to find.

"We trust the people will protect our business. I have shareholders from every part of the country and I have appointed agents from every part of the city.

Nor is he worried by latent anti-Americanism in a city where a UN force in which the US military had a major role killed thousands of Somali gunmen and civilians in the early 1990s.

"My message to the Somalis is first of all that this business belongs to you. And second, to the Somalis abroad, I advise them to do something useful for this desperate country."

He said he tailored the business plan for Mogadishu, Somalia's most dangerous place and infested by up to 60,000 gunmen, by including every clan on the board of the plant.

Maina Kariuki, Coca-Cola East Africa director for public affairs, confirmed that Isse's venture would be bottling the US-based multinational's soft drink on a franchise basis.

- REUTERS