"The president has arrived, the president has arrived," chant youths in Mogadishu's Beerta Khaatka market as armed men in trucks mounted with machine guns escort trucks with horns blaring through the throng.
The joking salutation is not for Somalia's president but hails a national institution nonetheless: white sacks brimming with leafy sprouts of khat, the narcotic shrub chewed across the Horn of Africa and Yemen in a tradition dating back centuries.
The ubiquitous sight of young men with rifles slung over their shoulders and green stalks of khat dangling from their mouths is emblematic of the Somalia of recent decades, where marauding Islamist rebels and warlords bent on carving out personal fiefdoms have fomented a culture of guns and violence.