Maravi

The scramble for Zambia

The scramble for Zambia
By Edem Djokotoe
Friday October 03, 2008 [04:00]

On 1st September 2006, I published an article in this column headlined Life Without Advertising. I have been tempted to reprise it two years, two months and two days later not to commemorate the tide of angry corporate reaction it generated but to draw attention to the effects of the conspiracy between municipal authorities all around the country and big business on the urban and rural landscape.

I know councils have to find a way of generating money but I think they should draw the line somewhere about where and how companies advertise in public spaces municipal authorities hold and manage in trust for the citizenry. What is happening now is not too different from the historical episode we know as The Scramble for Africa where the big powers of Europe carved up our continent as though she were a Christmas turkey! Now big corporations are scrambling for our public spaces and defacing them in their attempts to woo our custom with advertising!

In reproducing this article, I am hoping to elicit some kind of action from the Ministry of Local Government and Housing or even some civic response from ordinary people, many of whom are accepting 30 pieces of silver from companies so that their walls can be defaced with garish advertising.

How can anyone possibly hope to keep Zambia clean if we are all going to sit around and watch big business and political office seekers appropriate every tree, every street light, every wall they can find and splash them with advertising and campaign messages?

And a lot of the posters are being stuck onto trees, street lights and walls with glue, making them virtually impossible to remove without damaging these surfaces. It is the sense of outrage I feel when I see these things that has motivated me to dig up Life Without Advertising from my archives and reproduce it below.

“Today’s article was inspired by Kalito’s Letter to the Editor published in The Post exactly one week ago. Entitled ‘Celtel, MTN Advertising’, the letter reminded me of a documentary I watched on the Discovery Channel recently about an epic battle between an African bull elephant and a rhino.

“I am not sure exactly how accurate the parallel is, but indeed when two corporate behemoths lock horns, it is not just the grass that suffers; even innocent bystanders get caught in the crossfire. The evidence is there for all to see. A landscape which has become an advertising battlefield, running with blood of Celtel red and the fat of MTN yellow.

I’m yet to find a single person in Zambia today whose head isn’t spinning from this advertising blitz unleashed on a hapless population by these two telecommunications giants. Word on the street is that if you stand in one place for five minutes, either Celtel splashes you with red or MTN with yellow! The two competitors are scrambling for every available space with a passion not seen since The Scramble for Africa when the imperial forces of Europe carved up the continent like a turkey.

“Kalito is afraid The War of the Primary Colours will claim many more casualties in the city of Lusaka, like it has in my neighbourhood where, in a one-kilometre radius, you will find six instances of advertising defacement. ‘I tremble at the thought of seeing Evelyn Hone College’s newly erected wall fence along Church Road suddenly coated in red and yellow,’ he writes.

“Doesn’t all this make you want to close your eyes, block your ears and imagine what Life without Advertising would be? Of course, money from advertising revenue keeps the production costs of newspapers down, making them a lot more affordable to ordinary readers and giving the press a chance of financial sustainability beyond unit sales.

But think about the piece of mind you could enjoy in a world without billboards, without irritating jingles blaring on your radio every other minute, persuading you to buy something you don’t need, without having to be crudely interrupted by an advert as you watch your favourite programme on television after a hard day’s work.

“Don’t get me wrong. Advertising fulfills an important informational role in the world of commerce and industry and is more practical and more efficient than direct, person-to-person selling.

But there’s need to draw the line somewhere. I think it is important to draw a line between advertising that helps you make informed choices and advertising that is pure seduction, founded on outright lies. The kind calculated to lead you up a garden path, like trying to convince you that if you drank a certain brand of chibuku, you’d be showing “Respect”. To whom, I wonder?

“When I was a teenager, I was almost seduced by advertising to turn myself into a human chimney. Looking back, I am happy parental guidance prevailed at a time when Will Power did not stand much of a chance against Temptation. I was intrigued by Benson & Hedges cigarette ads, particularly the catchy slogan: Discover Gold. Those who have seen this brand will know that the packet is a rich gold and all the magazine and billboard adverts I saw advertising Benson & Hedges exploited this colour scheme brilliantly.

Of course, every single advert carried a public health message (in very small print, I might add) that the Surgeon-General had warned that cigarette smoking was dangerous to your health. But who really paid attention to a drab public warning competing for attention with slick, glossy photography and the message: Discover Gold?

“But even in print media advertising, there has been some regulation.
For instance, in 1998 the tobacco industry and the Attorneys-General of 46 states in the US agreed to ban the use of cartoon characters in tobacco advertising because it was felt the practice encouraged young people to start smoking. This was after there was a public outcry over the use of Joe Camel, a popular cartoon character, to sell Smooth, a brand of cigarette.

“Proponents of advertising argue that we shouldn’t take advertising messages too literally and that as rational beings, we ought to be able to suspend our disbelief just as we do when we watch a movie. We know the blood we see on the silver screen is not real and that the vampire on the silver screen sinking his fangs into his victim’s neck is just an ordinary actor earning a living. So why shouldn’t we cut advertising the same amount of slack?
“Why indeed!

Try telling a consumer who is under-paid, overworked and over-taxed and who has to struggle year after year to put food on the table, to clothe his family that you have made his life better because he happens to subscribe to a particular mobile phone service for which he has to pay! And he is not supposed to be pissed off with the service provider when he constantly has to battle with network problems! Not only that.

The glib sloganeering notwithstanding, his socio-economic circumstances doesn’t change at all. I admit, catchy slogans are an advertiser’s stock in trade, but trying to insult our intelligence with some of the things they are throwing at us is another question altogether.

“Actually, it was in trying to insult our intelligence that advertisers gave birth to soap operas in the late 1920s. They realised they could cash in on the gullibility of the public and make a tonne of money in the process. Soap opera grew out of American commercial radio in the late 1920s, when all the smaller stations were being hooked up to make two large, rival national networks, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System (now CBS). Once large sections of the American public were able to hear the same programmes, advertisers began searching for the perfect series that would be most effective in selling their products.

You see, this is because radio and TV stations in the US and Europe operate on the basis of ratings, that is, the size of listeners and viewers who tune in to a particular programme at a given time. This helps them put a value on air time. The more listeners or viewers a station has at a given time, the more expensive the air time is.

“And the battle between and among competing stations is really about audience share. So CBS and NBC started to target the daily 15-minute romantic dramas about people with whom listeners, mostly housewives, identified. The first dramas were sponsored by the big soap manufacturing companies (Lever Brothers, Colgate-Palmolive and Procter and Gamble).

That was how the name ‘soap opera’ was coined. ‘Soap’ for the products that were advertised; secondly, ‘opera’ because the dramas were highly exaggerated and melodramatic.

They were targeted at housewives because who else but a housewife would have a passionate love affair with a detergent? In short, soap opera is a derogatory term for a never-ending story with an implausible plot aimed at viewers and listeners who have nothing better to do with their time and whose intellect is low. Of course, you won’t find that definition in a dictionary, but that is what it is.

“And that is why, as a matter of principle, I don’t watch soap operas, or ‘soapies’ as they are popularly called. They were born out of a conspiracy by advertisers to seduce us and take money out of our pockets while our senses are befuddled.

“For the record: I have nothing against advertising or advertisers. But like I said, there is need to draw the line somewhere. Consumer protection associations must do what they can to protect us from unscrupulous advertising because let’s face it, advertising will not tell us the whole truth about the products they are unloading on us.

“I know that in the US, more and more people are taking an aggressive stance against corporations whose adverts have had far-reaching implications on their lives. Four years ago, Caesar Barber, 58 sued Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s for jeopardising his health with their greasy, salty menus by misleading him about their nutritional value in their adverts.

Barber, who weighed 122.4 kg at the time, filed the suit on behalf of a number of other obese New Yorkers who eat fast food consistently, saying the corporations did not disclose the ingredients of their food and the risks that came with eating too much of it. His lawyer, Samuel Hirsch, said the multi-billion fast food industry has an obligation to warn consumers of the dangers of eating their menus. ‘It’s a question of informing consumers the same way cigarette manufacturers warn smokers by law that smoking is dangerous to their health,’ he said in an interview.

“Such public protection is a public health prerogative.

I remember how in 2003, the Ministry of Health in Zambia banned the importation of Jiggies, a popular children’s snack on grounds that the product contained tartrazine, a widely used food colouring made from coal tar used in cakes, biscuits, soft drinks.

Tatrazine is also fed to chickens to give their yolks an incredibly yellow look. Anyway, to redeem its image and its market share following the Ministry of Health ban and the report that appeared on ZNBC, Carnival Foods, the company that makes Jiggies, launched a public relations campaign. It involved sending Luckson Nthani, the ZNBC reporter who did the report to their factory in South Africa.

“Nthani told me in an interview: ‘Carnival Foods complained that their market in Zambia had been ruined by my report on ZNBC TV. They showed us around the factory and tried to underplay the fact that Jiggies does indeed contain tartrazine,’ he said.

“Today, Jiggies is back on the shelves, albeit with different packaging. Gone is the reference to tartrazine on the packaging. In its place is a reference to ‘food colouring’ but no-one knows which kind. What is the Ministry of Health doing about it in the interest of public health? Search me. I asked the ministry this question among others I sent in a press query in January 2004. I am still waiting for an answer.

“While things like this may seem inconsequential in Zambia and other parts of Africa, within the European Union (EU), nutritional labelling is optional for food production corporations unless any nutritional claims are made in advertising or on the package, in which case it is compulsory. The information should spell out how many kilojoules, calories and how much protein, sugar, carbohydrates and fat, cholesterol, sodium and sugar alcohols (polyols) are contained in the food.

“It may seem like a bit of a bother, but such information helps consumers make informed choices—in the interest of their own health. It’s fine, for instance, for a company to advertise the exciting range of flavours of maheu it has just launched. But what we want to know is: what does it contain and how much? I need to know that the product I am about to drink will energise me, not make me sick because I may be allergic to some ingredient they haven’t had the presence of mind to tell me about.”

Postscript: Since I wrote this article, Celtel has morphed into Zain. As one would expect, with the change has come a change in corporate identity. Thankfully, we don’t have to be assaulted with Celtel Red everywhere we go, no matter how remote. But that is not to say Zain Black (or is it green?)is a better substitute. Frankly, this is not about colour but about a wanton disrespect of civic values and public spaces. Who knows? Perhaps tomorrow, some consortium could take over MTN and decide to replace the chicken yellow of the mobile phone company with psychedelic purple? And none of us would be the better for it, I can tell you that. Except, of course, those who profit from defacing our environment. Enjoy your weekend!
edjokotoe@yahoo.com

“But question is: how golden are a smoker’s lungs? What about the fact that cigarette smoking has been proved to cause lung cancer among smokers and foetal injury and premature birth for pregnant women?

It is because of this that today, cigarette advertisements can no longer be aired on television in Great Britain and the United States. Public concern about the promotion of addictive substances in a medium to which there is a wide access, particularly by children has led to this regulation. However, newspapers and magazines are still free to carry such advertisements, as long as these ads are accompanied by a public health warning talking about the dangers of smoking.

Labels: ADVERTISING

posted by MrK @ 8:49 PM