When KFC came to town Suddenly prosperous, Ghana embraces fried chicken — but also faces rising obesity.
ACCRA, GHANA — After finishing high school a decade ago, Daniel Awaitey enrolled in computer courses, dropped out to work in a hotel, then settled into a well-paying job in the booming oil sector here.
He has an apartment, a car, a smartphone and a long-distance girlfriend he met on a dating website. So he had reasons and the means to celebrate his 27th birthday in late July. His boss and co-workers joined him for an evening of laughter and selfies, lingering over dinner at his favorite restaurant: KFC.
Awaitey first learned about the fried chicken chain on Facebook. The “finger lickin’ good” slogan caught his attention, and it has lived up to expectations. “The food is just —” he said, raising his fingertips to his mouth and smacking his lips. “When you taste it you feel good.”
Ghana, a coastal African country of more than 28 million still etched with pockets of extreme poverty, has enjoyed unprecedented prosperity in the past decade, buoyed by offshore oil. Although the economy slowed abruptly not long ago, it is rebounding, and the signs of new fortune are evident: millions moving to cities for jobs, shopping malls popping up, and fast food roaring in.
Chief among the corporate players is KFC, and its parent company, Yum Brands, which have muscled northward from South Africa — where KFC has 850 outlets and a powerful brand name — throughout sub-Saharan Africa: to Angola, Tanzania, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Ghana and beyond.
But KFC’s expansion here comes as obesity and related health problems have been surging. Public health officials see fried chicken, french fries and pizza as spurring and intensifying a global obesity epidemic that has hit hard in Ghana — one of 73 countries where obesity has at least doubled since 1980. In that period, Ghana’s obesity rates have surged more than 650 percent, from less than 2 percent of the population to 13.6 percent, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an independent research center at the University of Washington.
The causes of obesity are widely acknowledged as complex — involving changing lifestyles, genetics and, in particular, consumption of processed foods high in salt, sugar and fat.
Research shows that people who eat more fast food are more likely to gain weight and become obese, and nutrition experts here express deep concern at the prospect of an increasingly heavy and diabetic population, without the medical resources to address a looming health crisis that some say could rival AIDS.
KFC executives see a major opportunity here to be part of people’s regular routines, a goal they are advancing through a creative marketing campaign and use of social media. When asked if it is unhealthy for people to eat fried chicken often, Kimberly Morgan, a KFC spokeswoman in Plano, Texas, said, “At KFC, we’re proud of our world famous, freshly in-store prepared fried chicken and believe it can be enjoyed as a part of a balanced diet and healthy lifestyle.”
Company representatives said KFC takes health seriously in the region, noting its sponsorship of a youth cricket league in South Africa. The company, they said, has worked to make its menu healthier and more diverse.
“That’s why we provide consumers choice,” said Andrew Havinga, who runs the supply chain for KFC’s Africa division.
For now, though, KFC customers in Ghana have fewer healthy options than in Western countries. Grilled chicken, salads and sides like green beans and corn, standard at KFCs in the United States, aren’t available here. Havinga said KFC hoped to offer Ghanaians more options eventually.
KFC emphasizes its focus on sanitation and cleanliness. Greg Creed, the chief executive of Yum, said in an interview last year on CNN that people “actually trust us that it’s so much safer to eat at a KFC in Ghana than it is to eat obviously, you know, pretty much anywhere else.”
But some nutrition experts bristle at the implication.
“To say it’s the safest food is a bit like saying my hand grenade is the safest hand grenade,” said Mike Gibney, an emeritus professor of food and health at University College Dublin.
To many in Ghana, weight gain is an acceptable side effect of a shift from hunger to joyful consumption.
KFC is not just food, said Matilda Laar, who lectures about family and consumer sciences at the University of Ghana. “It’s social status.”
‘Skin in the game’
In 2011, Ashok Mohinani, whose company owns all the KFC franchises in Ghana, saw potential in fast food. Incomes were rising as Ghana’s oil business took off and other commodities soared. Its economy had grown 7 percent a year since 2005.
The first fast-food restaurants to move in were local chains that served fried chicken and mimicked Western brands. Mohinani was convinced a foreign chain would succeed.
“The obvious brand,” he said, “was KFC.”
KFC opened in South Africa in the early 1970s. It is now so popular that its executives say they impress dinner-party guests by name-dropping the company where they work.
Now, Mohinani said, the goal is to move KFC from a special treat to routine. Toward that end, he has opened restaurants alongside gas stations.
While McDonald’s remains the emblem of fast-food worldwide, Yum is second and grew 22.9 percent from 2011 to 2016, considerably more than the burger giant’s 12.2 percent growth, according to Euromonitor.
Crucial to its effort, the company said, is finding franchisees like Mohinani, who have “skin in the game” as Creed said on CNN. The company can rely on their knowledge of the local market and commitment to the investment.
Health consequences
In Ghana, data suggest that the change in diet to heavier fare — including fast food but also processed foods — has led to soaring health risks.
The death rate associated with high body mass index more than doubled in Ghana from roughly 14 per 100,000 in 1990 to 40 per 100,000, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation — and is fast approaching the global average of 54 deaths per 100,000.
Further complicating the situation in Ghana, medication for high blood pressure is expensive and patients often ration it to save money.
The nation’s health system lacks specialists and doctors.
Laar, the lecturer from the University of Ghana, said the lack of proper care meant that some people would live with metabolic syndrome until they dropped.
“It’s common that you’ll see someone just pass out and die,” she said.
One smoldering July day, mourners gathered in Accra to pay tribute to someone who did just that — Vivian Acheampong, 56, who had collapsed at home while hanging laundry on the clothesline and died two days later in a hospital.
The doctors had told them that one major factor in her death was inattention to her high blood pressure: She had not listened to their advice to change her eating habits, and she could not afford all the medicine prescribed to control her condition. Relatives were convinced that her love of fried, fatty food had led her to become obese and played a role in her death.
Acheampong’s son, Alfred Osei Tutu, said she had only dabbled in fast food and had never eaten at KFC. But she had developed a taste for such fare, usually cooked at home, after she moved from her native village to the capital 15 years ago.
She fit in a demographic most affected by rising obesity here: women living in cities. A study published last year in the journal BMC Medicine found that obesity among urban female adults in Ghana was 34 percent, compared with 8.3 percent for women in rural areas; among urban men, the rate was 7 percent, compared with 1.3 percent in rural areas.
“You have more money, you have more food,” her son said.
Little action
In office since January, President Nana Akufo-Addo is in the midst of fulfilling a campaign promise to build a factory in each of the nation’s 216 districts. He has begun cracking down on illegal gold mining.
Of course, he said, he is worried about skyrocketing obesity and related diseases. Like many of his countrymen, the president is overweight. He said he’s also concerned about the increase in fast-food restaurants that fuel the trends but said: “I’m strongly averse to banning things.”
Akufo-Addo said he hoped to address the problem by expanding national health insurance. That, though, he said, is “a work in progress,” given the expense. So, for now, without specifics, he echoed leaders from other nations (and food companies): “There must be heightened public awareness of what’s good and bad in terms of eating habits.”
The presidential palace is not far from the country’s most popular KFC, where a part-time pastor, Joshua Edwards, stopped to buy chicken for five boys living in an orphanage.
“My health is my life, so I have to be cautious about my life,” he said. “God needs my body to do things to his glory.”
Still, Edwards said he came to KFC almost every day.
“You become addicted to the spices,” he said.
“They don’t force us to eat here,” he added, “But it’s as if we’ve become mentally enslaved. It tantalizes us by even saying it, pulling you to where you don’t want to be.”