Alfresco Business : Africa’s Tiny Shops Thrive Amid Poverty
Alamine Abbo steered his blue Peugeot taxi under the shade of a thorn tree on the dusty main street here the other day and ordered up 10 liters of Ali Abakar’s finest.
Abakar, a barefoot 25-year-old with a Seiko watch gleaming on his wrist, lifted a huge green wine jug from his table, fed one end of a sawed-off garden hose into the wider neck of the jug and the other end into Abbo’s gas tank. Then he blew into the jug, expertly hefted it to his shoulder, and 2 1/2 gallons of reddish brown gasoline disappeared down the hose and into the car.
Abakar collected the proceeds, faded African francs worth about $8, picked up his wrench and turned back to the motorcycle that he had been repairing.
N’Djamena has its share of gas stations dispensing brand-name fuel from shiny modern pumps, but it also has dozens of more rudimentary establishments--plywood tables covered with old jugs and whisky bottles full of gasoline for sale at competitive prices.
Entrepreneurs Make a Buck
The gasoline stands of N’Djamena, flourishing in one of the world’s poorest countries, are typical of the small enterprises that thrive all across Africa these days. From the kiosks that repair flat tires in rural Senegal to the outdoor barbers of Kenya, hundreds of thousands of African entrepreneurs make a buck by selling, fixing, servicing or creating.
In the midst of debt crises, currency crises, export crises and the other economic woes of African nations, these tiny businesses survive by following the simplest economic principle--meeting the demand of a consuming public.
In rural Senegal not long ago, a driver with a flat tire scanned the roadside shops in a farm village 150 miles from the seaside city of Dakar until he saw a tall stack of tread-bare Firestone and Goodyear tires--the universal sign of Africa’s tire repairmen.
Fixing flat tires is a profitable line of work in Africa, thanks to the sad state of the roads, the poor quality of the tires and the common practice of running tires until they are ragged and bald.
Crude Equipment
The tire stand proprietor in Senegal hauled the flat out of the driver’s trunk and rolled it to a spot in front of his open-faced shack. He filled the inner tube, using a bicycle pump, and poured rust-brown water from a dented metal tea kettle over the rubber skin, rubbing the surface in search of the hissing leak. The leak was repaired with a strip of old rubber and glue--for the equivalent of a couple of dollars.
Even in a big city like Nairobi, Kenya, the street entrepreneur thrives amid the hotels, restaurants, boutiques and craft stores. Along Aga Khan Walk, a pedestrian walkway in the shadow of Nairobi’s tall downtown office buildings, two barbers ply their trade without benefit of walls, a front window, a front door or a sign.
Like the artists of America’s parks and the musicians of Europe’s subways, the haircutters of Kenya need only a few tools for their trade: a comb, a battery-operated razor, a pair of scissors, a towel and a chair. The cost of a haircut: about $1.25.
The most common small enterprises in Africa are the sidewalk peddlers, also known as market people, who hawk their goods from cardboard shops that they fold up and take home at night. Soap and brushes, vinyl handbags and hair nets, cigarettes and hard candy, peanuts and French bread, batteries and belts, the list is endless. One table-top peddler in Accra, Ghana, sells hubcaps and nothing else.
Motorists Solicited
Entrepreneurs without the luxury of a table often wade right into traffic in pursuit of customers. Time, Newsweek and an assortment of other publications are sold to motorists in Nairobi by agile young salesmen who dodge in and out of traffic.
In port cities of Nigeria and Ghana, the latest ship to dock usually determines the selection of goods on the streets. European-made cigarettes and candy are the usual offerings. But one afternoon, a peddler in Accra was offering a new pair of gray polyester slacks for sale, holding them out at his side like a bullfighter’s cape as the traffic zipped past.
The spirit of enterprise permeates even the most lifeless economies in Africa. The economy sputters, for instance, in the Chadian capital of N’Djamena, a city scarred by war and overwhelmed by poverty, where vegetables and fruit are often hard to find--and imported goods are even rarer.
Chad has only about 75 miles of paved roads, long stretches of them virtually impassable, and one car for every 1,000 people. The average yearly income, $80, would buy one 20-gallon tank of gas.
Businesses Slow to Return
Yet dozens of one-man gasoline stands here manage to make a profit by selling gas for less than the city’s big service stations.
Abakar and his fellow entrepreneurs got their foothold here six years ago after the city was very nearly destroyed by civil war. Conventional businesses were slow to return, but the diplomats, economists, relief workers and journalists who came to town needed transportation, and the taxis needed gas. The table-top gasoline stands began to appear.
These days business is steady at the “Super Mobil En Face de Hotel de Ville Mairie--N’Djamena, Tchad,” as the hand-lettered sign on an oil drum identifies Abakar’s operation. It is, as the name indicates, the “Super Mobil’ in front of N’Djamena’s Town Hall. (There is no connection whatsoever to the oil company of the same name.)
The front pocket of Abakar’s long blue djellaba gown was stuffed with Central African francs on a recent afternoon. He sells 25 to 50 gallons of gas a day at about $3 a gallon, a dollar less than the gasoline being pumped out of the modern station down the street.
A few months ago, the big gas stations of N’Djamena, complaining about their empty bays, asked the government to shut down the small-time petrol peddlers. But President Hissen Habre refused.
Safe for Now
“For the time being, we’re safe,” Abakar said. “As long as the government lets us stay, we’ll be able to make a living.”
Each morning at 6:30, before the sky over N’Djamena clouds with blowing sand, Abakar assembles his gasoline stand, taking the equipment from a nearby building where a friend lets him store it overnight. The 2 1/2- and 5-gallon wine jugs are lined up neatly; they are for cars. The smaller whisky bottles, many with White Horse labels, are for motorbikes. Abakar mixes the gasoline himself, with a formula that he prefers not to divulge, and uses a funnel to fill each bottle.
Next to the gas containers are plastic jugs for motor oil, transmission fluid and brake fluid. Faded labels identify them as Mobil and Shell products; Abakar insists that they are the real thing.
Abakar buys his gasoline from a local middleman who imports it from Cameroon, a 20-minute boat ride across the Chari River from N’Djamena, or from Nigeria to the northwest.
Started at 15
He has been in business, at the same location, for a decade, since he was 15 years old. Now it supports his two wives and three children, although he declines to say how much profit he makes.
A few years ago, Abakar invested $350 in a manual pump with a glass bulb, the type that American gas stations used in the 1930s. The pump, tapped into a 50-gallon drum, is a rare modern touch among N’Djamena’s petrol peddlers. If nothing else, Abakar says, it distinguishes his service station from the roadside purveyors of traditional medicine, whose old wine bottles are filled with brown potions.
Sometimes Abakar uses the pump to gas up vehicles directly. But it does not measure how much gas he is delivering--using the bottles allows him to do that--and drivers often pull up out of reach of its short hose.
Still, the secret of success in Chad, and in Africa, is not in the equipment. It is the same as anywhere in the world, according to Abakar.
Question of Quality
“People come to me because the quality of my petrol is good,” he said, leaning against a translucent jug of gasoline that he keeps on display as a sample of that quality. “They also come here because everything is neat and clean. If it were dirty, they wouldn’t buy from me.”
Abakar keeps a wrench, screwdriver and pliers on hand for small mechanical repairs, and he makes service calls, up to two miles away, for customers who run out of gas. He is a familiar figure on the roadways of N’Djamena, carrying a jug of gasoline on his shoulder with the hose wrapped around his neck. He walks because he doesn’t own a car.
When Abbo, the taxi driver, arrived at the Super Mobil late in the afternoon recently it was just reopening. Abakar and some of his friends had been sitting cross-legged, facing east and chanting prayers.
The day had been a busy one. A lot of people were driving, Abakar said. And the more they drove, the more gasoline they needed.
“You know,” Abakar said, smiling as he arranged the day’s take in his new, red leather wallet, “I like this business.”
