That shopping centre,” said my Somali translator pointing to a garish multi-storey building clad in tinted glass, “was built with pirate money.” As we bumped along yet another traffic-clogged street that was more rubble than road the translator pointed out a series of half-built high-rise apartments, shopping malls and hotels.
“People talk of global recession, but here there’s no recession,” he laughed.
Above the banging and clattering of the construction boom the ear-piercing calls of the muezzins echoed. Beat-up buses disgorged the newest arrivals fresh from Somalia, and on Twelfth Street a row of wooden kiosks awaited the daily delivery of khat, a popular narcotic herb...more,,http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article6977516.ece
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