Global giants started studying changing habits of Africans food consumption a decade ago with the view of making expansion moves. This was based partly on an article in Morning Star, a financial newspaper, in which it was observed that as income rises anywhere in the world, the first thing that changes is the size of the plate. I guess when we have meager means, our wish is to eat more, a lot more. In fact, Morning Star’s study noted that meat tend to form the largest portion of that increase on plate size. By simply observing the size of our plate and its contents they rolled up their corporate sleeves.
Armed with this information, Africa’s newly acquired fast-food CULTure seductively beckoned international fast-food chains. The scramble that ensued which continues to date is comparable to the gold rush. But the gold mines here were on two legs with a skin covered with extra melanin to wade off the equatorial sun. In my first book Dollar Altar published in 2014, I cautioned African Countries about the dangers of copying Western eating habits. I warned that moribund outcomes of highly processed hastily grown and fast prepared foods had left the U.S. with 100 Million people with Diabetes and High Blood Pressure. With these precursors of cardiovascular terminators, most men and women in the U.S. take their last breath on account of food, bad food, fast food. I was informed by the old adage that if you eat like the Romans, you die like the Romans.
In the dawning months of 2021, I was horrified when a foreign branded fast-food restaurant arrived in my hometown 45 kilometers North of Nairobi City. For the outskirts to behold this sight, I knew the tide had saturated Nairobi and was heading straight to the other urban places to capture the taste buds of those who wanted a taste of food abroad. It was like a promise to travel abroad without a visa. Simply, abroad had come to my hometown.
I was horrified because I was witnessing what I had foreseen and cautioned in Dollar Altar the book. After the horror of the news subsided, I decided to go to that newcomer in town for a first-hand experience. Not to take a bite of slow death in fast food but to observe clueless souls that were happy to buy obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure. On arrival, I parked right in front of the entrance for a better view. Feeling like some sort of crime scene investigator, the evidence of a changed lifestyle was right there on their expanded waistlines and hanging bellies of some steady flow of customers. Their new international branded clothes seemed tired to hold the weight and profusely threatening to pop. Others pieces of high-end attire appeared to sob for a wardrobe makeover. Still others were oversized garments attempting to disguise what was obvious. There were a good number of skinny looking twenty somethings reared on Disney Junior. For them, the TV shows were now a reality they could experience. But their presence here meant skinny would be traded for obesity or morbidity in a few calendars.
Among them, those that at first glance looked like their parents were actually kids imprisoned in adult-looking bodies. The high pitched tones betrayed the boys in mens’ bodies and the somewhat flat chests betrayed the girls. They seemed unable to walk and breathe at the same time. At one point, I found myself hyperventilating as I stared at an obese child struggling to breath and walk. I must have been taking an extra breath for the helpless kid being offered on a Dollar Altar by their well cashed parents. At another point I shouted, “getting into that place will make your breathing worse next week.” But fortunately or unfortunately they didn’t hear me as my well tinted windows were shut close. Phew!!!
With each purchase of the foreign taste and fascination that the deep-fried chicken, burgers, pizzas and other cholesterol-packed hurried-food offered, was also a ticket to a hospital in the future. But I was the only one worried about that. The delicious aroma blown by the evening breeze had intoxicated those that seemed to walk ever faster with each step as they approached the new fast-food restaurant. It was as if an invisible hand was pulling them in. Who could afford to think five or ten years ahead with a mind bewitched by adverts sourced from marketing wizards? For now all faces looked merry and content as they exited the fast-food restaurant licking oily lips and fingers. Well, except for the kids struggling to walk and breathe at the same time.They looked lost in the sympathetic stares they attracted. But to their parents, their size announced their economic status. How sad!
The car parked next to me seemed like a global medical company that sells insulin to diabetics studying the new source of their future customers. I am sure they alerted the makers of surgical equipment that operate on clogged brains, hearts, and kidneys as the future in my home town and Kenya and indeed the entire Africa promised bountiful future. The new fast-food restaurant was not only a ‘crime scene’ I had predicted seven years earlier but a binocular that made the future of Kenya and indeed that of Africa visible in 20/20 vision.
But the oblivious customers were happy for now and exited the fast food joint with a face that seemed to shout ” I made it!” The pride in their gait appeared as those coming back from a restaurant abroad. Yes! their exit from the restaurant seemed like an exit from an airport by these global teletravellers.
As a medic who started his career in critical-care medicine as an ICU nurse in Cardio-Thoracic Critical Care (that’s where open heart surgery patients are take after surgery) in the U.S., I clearly saw their future in that instance. With my eyes gazing into the terrifying future of the happy people in front of me, I saw them on stretchers coming from the surgery due to heart attacks. Some were hooked on dialysis three times a week. Others had drains hanging from their skulls to drain blood leaked by blood pressure bursted vessels. Still others were bound to wheelchairs for they had both legs amputated from diabetic wounds.
This was not a bad dream but a sure future for the internationally ‘exposed’ and cashed middle class ‘eating well’. It’s not a dream or wishing bad luck to a man who knows not how to swim when you predict how he will meet his end as you witness him dividing into the deep end of an olympic-size swimming pool. Right? I was not wishing them ill, I was simply using data to chart their sure future. I had warned them seven years earlier of the fast food invasion heading their way, but did they read Dollar Altar?
As bad as this vivid future was, my concerns as an Economist were dire and the effects of their innocent action immediate. Their purchase was not only buying their future diseases, they were also sending money abroad. They were willing middle income Kenyans inadvertently crippling their own economy. You could say they were courting a financial collapse with each transaction. The shilling they spent in my local town was in three short months to be converted to dollars for an exit to the country where the fast-food restaurant’s parent company is located. Every quarter, the shilling experiences a predictable seizure as foreign companies and investors repatriate some of the income made in the previous three months.
These actions and transactions effectively relegate The Central Bank to the role of running fast food joints. For every transaction forces them to beg IMF for a loan to keep these restaurants in business while our Shilling slides toward worthlessness.
This is what I was staring at in my economically struggling hometown. Struggling because on the day I was making these observations, restaurants that served healthy foods had been told to operate at third capacity. But fast-food ones were thriving and a new one had just opened its door even in these circumstances. What a perfect timing? I wondered if my countrymen knew that with each purchase they made, the money remaining in their pockets lost value instantly. Sadly, it surely gets worse with each successive transaction.
So they were not only buying preventable diseases but also sending money abroad instead of circulating it here by BUYING KENYA to BUILD KENYA. They were making their money in their bank worthless. All in a single transaction. All in a bite of death. A slow death from fast foods. Its more like three deaths in slow successions. One of the shilling or the economy, the other of their buying power and eventually that of the person taking the delicious foreign death bite. Three Death Circles intertwined in one bite.
Maybe this is why 3000 Kenyan nurses will be training in the U.K. It might be a training for branches of international hospitals when they come back to have local insiders who can operate branches in Kenya. Branches of international hospitals which perhaps had other economists parked in my hometown too studying what I was observing. The ‘crime scene’ points to a booming healthcare industry with strokes, heart attacks and kidney failure and amputated legs. All bought by the African middle class in their newly found disposable money. Disposed or more precisely wasted in buying their death. A bite of slow death from fast-food. A sure death. And with these new international hospitals, more channels to disperse or dispose our money abroad.
Enjoying your bite?
Robert Mwangi, MBA is the Author of the books, President’s Advisor, Money Circles, Five Fingers and Dollar Altar. He also composed and sung ZIBA UFA.
Article updated on Nov 4th 2022
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