On that night where the wind blew and all that could be heard were but the sound of crickets, the boy stood. A turban of fine linen covering his head made in the Sultanate. A pair of designer eyeglasses imported from the Republic of Bigtopia. And an ambitious scheme to be revealed as soon as the sun would certainly shine upon his Sultanate.
Foreign observers and pundits referred to him as Abubudi Mhuka the First. His own countrymen (and women) preferred to call him as 'Mhuka.' The Sultan's boy, His Serene Highness, He Who Shall Be Named Every Morning, The Future, et cetera.
As for him? He would rather be known as the ruler to open his nation to the outside world. The world had accelerated past the industrial revolution while the Khoori Sultanate slipped further behind each and every single day. An ingrained dark culture of Corporate welfarism, crony capitalism as well as the shoring up of unproductive and non-competitive domestic firms had for so long blighted his father's decades of market-led reform agenda; the overall negative impact of which was mitigated only nationally by the large foreign currency to be had from the Sultanate's plentiful resource of black gold.
The aging Sultan was dead, however, some would say murdered this morning. But to him, it mattered no less, for he would be next to replace his father by tomorrow morning. And accompanying that momentous occasion for his subject would be the widespread market reform known up to the present day by many Khoori people as the Mhukanomics, a portmanteau of the words 'Mhuka' and 'economics.'
