There exists, in the eastern most part of continental Africa, situated right at the tip of the protruding horn, the Federal Republic of Somalia. Somalia comprises six states of which at least two self-proclaim to be autonomous. Somaliland, an autonomous state, has gone as far as declaring itself an outright sovereign nation with its own army, police force and coast guard. Military plurality is next to impossible to rear peacefully. Recall the adage of the two bulls in the same kraal. Conflict is bound to ensue, and to ensue in earnest. In just February this year, the tenuous relationship between the autonomous states tore at the seams; violence broke out that claimed at least 300 lives and inflicted almost 2 000 injuries. By the time the fighting had subsided, some 200 thousand Somalis had been displaced.
This state of affairs can be traced back to last century when the military government took over from the Europeans. They experimented with Socialism as was popular among newly independent nations at the time. The beast that is colonialism was conflated with capitalism and perceived as a single evil so that every leader that took the reins from the colonialists tried, perforce, to maximise the distance between themselves and capitalism along with all other ideologies espoused by the West. The Somali military government proceeded to nationalise everything! Wena bhange, insurance company, oil company, konkhe! Unfortunately, Socialism’s notoriety is in skipping leg day and having underdeveloped legs to stand on. Eventually, it collapses into a heap like Jenga. And so it was with Somalia. The leader of the military state overtly favoured members of his own clan. Proceeds from foreign aid that were sent to bolster nation-wide humanitarian causes were only enjoyed by those who supported him. This soon antagonised the majority of Somali’s and led to escalations of violence that culminated in a civil war that fragmented the nation to this day.
Somalia today is universally regarded as a failed state. Foreign aid is still their largest single source of income. The majority of Somalis lead nomadic lives inhabiting temporary structures and having to relocate often chasing after pasture for their livestock. This lifestyle is one human beings evolved beyond 12 000 years ago. The country contends with extreme weather patterns owing to its proximity to the equator. Starvation, even to death, is commonplace. Somali GDP per capita is less than E8 000. If you were to compare that indicator with that of Eswatini you would find that it is about ten times less favourable. It’s not important what GDP per capita means but you can take note that the average liswati is economically ten times better off than the average Somali.
The efforts to address this modern day humanitarian crisis are a multitude but none of them have done anything for the fundamental structure of government. It’s still a clan-based government system. Only certain clans are eligible to assume presidency. They maintain specified ratios in government, clan-by-clan, cast in stone. No one is appointed on merit but rather on affiliations. As alluded to before, the clans hardly see eye-to-eye which results in countries forming within the country. Clans have their own flags and their own regions. Identity politics is the order of the day.
Another relic of the past is the activity of pirates in the coast of Somalia. The pirate culture evolved from Somali fishermen defending their territory against the European and middle eastern opportunists who would illegally overfish Somali seas exploiting the lack of a unified government with authority to enforce law and order. The fisherman took up arms and defended the waters of their own accord. Over time, the network of fishermen morphed into a network of criminal organisations.
The pirates operate along the busiest channel in the world, the Suez Canal. They hijack cargo ships and take the crews hostage for ransom. Unimaginable business costs are incurred attempting to navigate pirate infested waters and so a multi-national naval task force was deployed circa 2009. At that point, 50% of global pirate attacks were in that region. It was so pervasive that one could go to a Somali pirate lair and invest money into a future raid to get a share of the pirate booty. There were many pirate expeditions to choose from. Somalia and neighbouring territories were like a stock exchange for sea crimes. Pirates would pitch their planned criminal activity at sea to would be investors whom would finance their choice pirate organisation expected to pillage successfully. It was a wild time. Piracy has since lulled but nobody considers it eradicated. There are documented pirate attacks as recent as 2019.
The Sales Rep
Only as I get older (and hopefully wiser) do I realise how important my stint in a sales role was. I probably did not make the most of it then due to a myriad of reasons not least of all frustration. You may have a grand idea about who you are and what you have to offer but that is not always going to match up exactly with what others think. J. Cole once put it like this, “what good is being the one when you’re the only one that knows it?” to mean, what is the point of possessing something of value if that value is never realised.
As a member of the human race, you are fated to exist in a society. That means you have to socialise and cooperate with other individuals. You have to find ways to signal your value to those individuals to successfully ingratiate yourself. Take the example of the corporate ecosystem. You attain fancy degrees from Ivy League institutions to signal your worth. This works because it suggests to recruiters that you are someone who successfully competed against candidates of the highest calibre to be admitted into your program. Not only that, but you also made it out. You must be good! Perhaps 🤷🏾♂️. But the reality is academia is financially exclusive. More and more Ivy League qualifications are about how much you have rather than how brilliant you may be.
Luckily, there are other signals that you can send to corporates. Your experience is one example. You can use that to demonstrate that you have been responsible for business matters that transfer well to the role in question. That is useful. There’s also your achievements; that is, the results your experience yielded and how those compare to the results of others in the industry. All of these things combine to proxy your skillset which is what this whole thing is really about. A skill is the ability to do something. Recruiters just want to answer that question. Can you do it or not? Some institutions will send you a test before even meeting you. Your task here is to communicate your worth. Others would say, you must sell yourself.
That’s the word, “sell”. This is the crux of business - convincing economic agents to pay for what you are selling. Sales is the most important activity in business. The product being sold is a secondary consideration. The only attribute about the product that matters is how well it can sold. The job of the sales team is much easier when the product for sale is perceived to be good. In this case, you don’t even need the best sales force in the world to achieve your objectives. The product kinda sells itself (I know a strategic communications expert that will wrestle me to the ground for leaving this sentence in. “Mangaliso, don’t kid yourself. There is no product that sells itself!”).
A bad product, on the other hand, will not leave the shelves unless it is sold aggressively by a talented team. One entrepreneur said that he finds it easier to develop great products that can be sold by just about anyone than landing poor products that need a 99th percentile sales team to move. I think I am meandering to get to this one quote that has been living in my head for weeks, “The sales team is the spearhead and everyone in the back office is the rod behind the head.” I’m paraphrasing. I doubt I have retained any of the the poetry of the words as I first heard them. The meaning is clear though, without sales there is no revenue, and without revenue there is no business.
What I’m Reading
1. Turtles All The Way Down: Written by a creative favourite of mine but not engrossing enough in the end. I couldn’t finish it. I gathered a bit of the plot though. A billionaire businessman gets himself into trouble with the authorities and flees when he feels the walls closing in on him. Two adolescent girls who are friendly with the billionaire's son attempt to find him to claim a bounty. I think why I lost interest so quickly was because of how linear it was. Perhaps its a book targeted for a younger audience. I don’t know. You can skip this one.
2. Rules for Radicals: I then jumped to a non-fiction work that I also didn’t finish. Call it what you like but I am chalking this down as personal growth. I used to be so obsessed with finishing every book that I picked up. I would labour to finish books that were going nowhere because momma ain’t raise a quitter. Surely it isn’t the wisest way to spend your time reading something that you’re not particularly enjoying or learning from. It’s weird, though, that I didn’t read the whole thing because I was learning a lot from this one. Maybe the writer’s style irked me subconsciously 🤷🏾♂️.
This one was about revolution. Yes. Political revolution! Saul Alinsky posits that there are three socio-political classes. 1. The Haves. 2. The Have Nots. 3. The Haves a Little, Want Mores. Something that may be obvious to you about The Haves is that they want to maintain the status quo. They do not want to play any part in any sort of revolution lest they lose the privileges they enjoy in the existing regime winding up in a lower socio-politico stratum under a new dispensation. He used the term tempo-politically cold to capture this attitude. The Haves are willing to justify any societal oppression to keep revolution at bay.
The Have Nots are the diametric opposite. They are the ones that launch revolutions. What I found interesting in reading Alinsky was that after The Have Nots launch a successful coup d'état to take office, they insist on revising laws so that the same seizure of power they just performed is less likely to be undertaken successfully against them in future. A real life example of this phenomenon at play is last century India. After India had successfully employed passive aggressive tactics like hunger strikes to rid themselves of British rule, they banished the use of such tactics under their own dispensation. After revolutionaries become the establishment, they banish revolutions against themselves.
Rules for Radicals is really about launching your own revolution. How to organise. How to outmanoeuvre the powers that be. Picketing, demonstrations, strikes etc. Alinsky advises that your revolution should raise many issues so as to attract many people. If it has too few issues, you may fail to amass the numbers that you need to threaten the status quo. He gave an example of a protest that was orchestrated whereby the revolutionaries placed several voluminous orders with this one particular store only to return all the items en masse upon delivery. This act created a nightmare for the sales, admin and delivery teams crippling operations for two days. He warns further that history is a relay of revolutions. As soon as you're successful with your own, you perforce pass the torch to the next one that will be fashioned against you.
3. Finally I read Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa written by a Brian Peterson. After reading about revolutions, I followed the theme towards African revolutions. I credit a quote by Terence Ranger that goes something like, “Political biographies on post colonial African leaders are an urgent priority.” I tend to agree.
What I could gather immediately about Thomas Sankara was that he seemed to care deeply about his people. Something like Steve Biko. He thought so highly of black people and expressed as much at every opportunity. He did not like labels such as communist or marxist-leninist or populist. He just wanted his people to overcome poverty. He wanted all his people to be educated and believed all rights enjoyed by men were apt to be enjoyed equally by women as well. In that era, when you were anti-establishment and asked for black people to be regarded with dignity you were instantly called a communist.
When Thomas Sankara became president after his coup in 1983, he would change the the country’s name from Upper Volta to Burkina Faso. Burkina Faso translates to “the land of the upright people.” Some translations suggest “land of honest people” or “… incorruptible people.” And boy did he mean that! He is said to have denounced luxury, choosing to cycle to work rather than being chauffeured in a motor vehicle to save petrol. He refused foreign aid citing the “strings attached.” He refused to pay back the nation’s debt to Burkina Faso’s colonisers saying that it was the colonisers that owed the people a debt that they could never repay. The debt of blood. He had interesting ideas about religion claiming that it served the rich in a different way than it did the poor. He even suggested that perhaps there should be a Bible for the poor and a separate Bible for the rich.
Sankara also meddled into his officials’ social lives. He would interfere with people’s mistresses. Economically, he tried protectionism on certain fruits and banned their importation. He prioritised millet for food and restricted its use in producing beer. That’s the line. He crossed it. He would pay with his life for imposing the strict austerity measures in service of the people... at the hands of his best friend no less. He was assassinated at just 37 years old. Sankara had this grand idea of what people could be. Unfortunately, people are what they are, not what they could be. His is a story worth telling and re-telling. Go ahead and read this one.
👋🏾.
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