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 Protecting Young People Alcohol, Advertising, and Youth in Kenya justin willis In June 2005 the government of Kenya announced that it intended to ban alcohol advertising from television and billboards.The announcement was explicitly linked to the dangers that such advertising posed to young people: the ban was intended to “protect young people from becoming hooked.”1 The decision, which had been under consideration since the previous year, came some months after a decision to ban alcohol advertisements on billboards from the vicinity of schools.2 The announcement was greeted with enthusiasm by some commentators, who immediately located it in the context of anxieties over the vulnerability of the young to the wiles of advertisers: “Adverts lure, especially youth, to start drinking early. We cannot do away with alcohol but unless the consumption levels are checked, our country will be doomed,” opined one correspondent in the Daily Nation. Another observer emphasized the extraordinary power of television: “[T]he constant association of alcohol use with glamour on TV has the great potential for conditioning young people into imagining that alcohol consumption always goes together with success. . . .This conditioning leaves many people completely powerless over alcohol, the victims of their circumstances.”3 Another correspondent noted the success of the beer industry, but argued “Let us not think only about profit. Let us also consider the health and the future of Kenyans, especially the young. Let us support the ban.”4 Others were much less enthusiastic. The formal liquor industry in Kenya is dominated by various corporate manifestations of a single company, East African Breweries Limited (EABL), which merely announced that it was “consulting with the Government”; but the newspapers recorded much protest from the advertising industry, and (apparently) from ordinary people.5 “[T]his will lead to many people losing their jobs,” wrote one; “there are people who never watch or listen to the adverts, who are serious drinkers,” noted another.6 In a public opinion survey, 50 percent favored the ban while 49 percent opposed it.7 The chair of the Marketing Society of Kenya (a Muslim woman, incidentally) demanded that the government convene a “stakeholders’ meeting” to discuss the ban: “We do not 12  j u s t i n w i l l i s want to believe that this Government, which was elected on a platform of change, will renege on its pre-election pledge of creating employment.”8 The sense of outrage on behalf of industry was predictable. The formal liquor industry in Kenya has enjoyed a generally very close relationship with the state since the 1950s; and although this has been somewhat strained in the early 1990s, the election victory at the end of 2002 of the National Rainbow Coalition had apparently restored the earlier coziness.9 EABL, as it never lost an opportunity to remind anyone who would listen, was a very substantial and reliable contributor of revenue to the Kenyan treasury, through a range of taxes; and it had continued a well-established pattern of advertising that associated its products with success and—on the whole—with the aspirations of good citizenship.That the government was nonetheless willing to ban advertising must have come as a significant shock. As it turned out, both the celebrations of the temperance lobby and the protests of the advertisers were premature. A week after announcing the imminent ban, the government spokesman, Alfred Mutua, appeared to temporize on the subject, saying that “We will give a balance between economic benefits and the social impact when we come to a decision.” Having said that the ban would be imposed within weeks, the government soon announced that the ban would be postponed for six months, and there were reports of “high-level consultations” with the industry.10 The six months has somehow not yet quite passed, and debate over the issue has apparently faded. In January 2009, television advertisements for alcohol were still appearing, and giant billboards along the roadside still proclaimed the virtues of Smirnoff vodka and Tusker beer. The “ban” and its quiet demise each raise questions, which this essay will explore . In considering how it was that the government came to publicly announce a ban, the essay will explore the evidence for problem drinking by youth in Kenya; it will suggest that this evidence is questionable but that a new line in advertising catalyzed wider concerns about youth behavior to produce a brief explosion of concern over youth drinking.The ban, then, was the consequence not of clear...

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