Little country, big dreams

“As a salt person, my first impression was why was all this salt just sitting here,” said Daniel R. Sutton, an American salt miner overseeing a new $70 million operation to industrialize the collection of Djibouti’s plentiful salt. “There’s 50 square miles of salt. This could be huge.”

Djibouti is becoming the little country of big dreams. Hundreds of millions of dollars of overseas investment is pouring in, promising to turn this sleepy, sweltering mini-state, which right now does not even have a stoplight, into something of an African trade centre.

There are gold miners from India, geothermal experts from Iceland, Turkish hotel managers, Saudi oil engineers, French bankers and American military contractors. Tycoons from Dubai are pumping in a billion dollars, largely for the country’s port. There is even a project on paper to build a multibillion-dollar, 18-mile bridge across the Red Sea, captained by Tarek bin Laden, the half brother of Osama bin Laden.

Djibouti does not have many people — about 500,000 — and few outsiders have heard of it. Its soil is mostly sand, it is unearthly hot — often more than 100 degrees — and just about everything, from bottled water to rice to gasoline, is imported.

But if there was ever an example of location, location, location, it is here. Djibouti sits at the mouth of the Red Sea, where Africa and Asia nearly touch. It overlooks some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, especially for oil heading from the Persian Gulf to Europe and the United States. And both France and the United States have military bases here.

Dubai is actually the country’s model for development, said Djibouti’s foreign minister, Mahmoud Ali Youssouf. “We’re a small country with a big port,” he said “And we’re even better located than Dubai.”

Clearly, little Djibouti has a long way to go. It is ranked 149 out of 177 on the United Nations human development index. But Djibouti’s smallness — it basically has one city, known as Djibouti town — is a virtue, business people say.

“If you need something, the government responds very fast,” said Nikhil Bhuta, the chief financial officer for the JB Group, an Indian mining company. Bhuta said he had set up mines across Africa but never had he experienced such generous terms of business — the deal he struck with the Djiboutian government splits gold profits 80 per cent for his company, 20 per cent for the government.

“In Africa, you never even get 50 per cent,” he said.

Other selling points? A stable currency, excellent French food and the fact that Djibouti is an outpost of relative stability in the Horn of Africa, a region constantly plagued by war, famine and drought — sometimes all at the same time.

But there’s a very visible cloud on the horizon: Eritrea. Djibouti’s prickly neighbour recently moved more than 1,000 soldiers into a disputed border zone. The troops are heavily armed and inches apart.

Local customs can also be a bit of a minefield. The population is predominantly Muslim, divided between Somalis and Afars, a nomadic group that plies the desert and sticks to its traditions.

Mr. Sutton said that shortly after he arrived to begin the salt mining operation, an Afar chief threatened to kill him.

“He was about 4-foot-tall with a 6-foot stick,” Sutton said. The chief was apparently angry that Sutton had not paid his respects.. Sutton said that he had agreed to hire as many Afars as possible and that he and the chief are now friends.