Book examines Heineken’s role in vulnerable nations

Heineken in Africa: A Multinational Unleashed Olivier van Beemen

In April 1994, a plane carrying Juvénal Habyarimana, the president of Rwanda, and Cyprien Ntaryamira, his Burundian counterpart, was shot down close to Kigali, the Rwandan capital. The assassination sparked the Rwandan genocide in which about 1-million people were killed.

There is a macabre footnote to that tragic history. According to Olivier van Beemen’s provocative book, Heineken in

Africa, the bodies of both presidents ended up in the Dutch beer company’s freezers.

The anecdote underlines Van Beemen’s main theme: the disparity in power between one of the world’s most profitable brewers and the poor African countries in which it makes a slice of its profits. In Rwanda and Burundi, Heineken’ scool rooms doubled up as the state mortuary.

The inequality of the relationship gives Heineken — and by extension other multinationals in Africa and in poor countries generally — huge sway. Heineken is often one of the biggest taxpayers in the countries in which it operates. Its potential influence over policy in nations with weak oversight is massive.

Heineken would have to be extraordinarily diligent to emerge from this skewed relationship with its moral integrity intact. It is Van Beemen’s contention, based on five years of research in 12 countries, that it does not.

His allegations range from the usual (aggressive advertising and tax policies, impact on alcoholism) to the more contentious, up to and including an alleged complicity, at least by alleged neglect, in the Rwandan genocide.

Heineken rejects that and other arguments, saying it played no role in the genocide but was merely caught up in events. The company alleges that the book is inaccurate in parts and slanted.

Still, Van Beemen uncovers questionable practices as well as genuine dilemmas faced by any company operating in a poor country. What to do, for example, if militia in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo are “taxing” your beer deliveries? If they are creaming off up to $1m a year, as the book contends, are you complicit in their violence?

When the book was first published in Dutch in 2015, the most controversial section was that dealing with Heineken’s use of young women to sell its beer. The trouble with so-called “beer promotion girls” started in Cambodia where women, not directly employed by Heineken were hired to promote beer in bars. Nongovernmental organisations in Cambodia accused Heineken of indirectly using sex workers and exposing them to harassment and HIV.

Heineken’s human resources manager, Hans Wesseling, according to an interview with Van Beemen, suggests that the company ’ s response — providing guidelines titled “Promotion Girls Policy: Selling Beer Safely ”— lacked credibility. “Heineken was going to tell these girls how to have safe sex when research showed they were being raped.”

In Nigeria, women selling the beer complained of constant sexual harassment. “Every evening I am touched against my will,” says Peace, who works in bars in Lagos. “During the instruction they tell us that there will be annoying men. But you have to tolerate them because you are trying to increase sales and make the brand stronger.”

Women get paid so little — about $8 a day in Lagos — that many feel almost obliged to sleep with customers to make ends meet, they tell the author. He writes: “The dividing line between promotion activities, prostitution and sexual abuse remains unclear.”

Another of Van Beemen’s allegations involves Rwanda. He contends that when the genocide of the Tutsi minority began in 1994, Heineken kept producing beer despite the killings taking place in an alcohol-fuelled frenzy.

“Heineken continued to produce beer, knowing that its product played a role in the mass killings.” Moreover, the Tutsi truck drivers who distributed the beer, and who had either fled or been killed, were promptly replaced with Hutu drivers, he writes.

“Is there a line in the sand for Heineken?” Van Beemen asks. When circumstances in a country “have changed so much that you can no longer operate there in an ethically responsible way”, do you then leave?

Other areas of concern include advertising practices that would be illegal in the West. In Rwanda, the company allegedly distributed 20,000 flyers to schools, ostensibly to teach children not to drink but, in Van Beemen’s reading, to introduce children to the brand.

Van Beemen also accuses Heineken of demonising local brews — such as chang’aa in Kenya, nicknamed “kill me quick”. In fact, he concludes, local hooch is actually richer in vitamin B and C, iron and potassium, and contains fewer calories and less alcohol.

That charge perhaps illustrates one of the problems

— or at least one of the questions — of the book. To some extent, companies are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If Heineken refused to invest in Africa on the grounds that it was too difficult, it might rightly be accused of cowardice — even prejudice. But if it does invest, it exposes itself to the sort of allegations in which Van Beemen delights.

One former employee asks the author why Heineken should be castigated for braving war, poverty and disease to bring beer to its customers. “Is pleasure only reserved for rich, white westerners?” he asks. It’s not a bad question.

Van Beemen’s conclusion is that big money-making enterprises and weakly regulated markets do not mix. /©