08 Apr 2014 | Tony Leon | Original Publication: BDlive
The presence of fast-food
hamburgers tells us more about our national economic and political wellbeing
than we might think, writes Tony Leon
WHAT does the presence of fast-food hamburgers, specifically the Big
Mac, tell us about our national economic and political wellbeing?
More than you might think. An item in the Washington Post at the weekend
caught my attention. It reported that the three McDonald’s restaurants in
Crimea, recently "abruptly annexed by Russia", are now closed. The
Ukrainian McDonald’s branch said the closure was for "technical
reasons" — although, as the reporter waspishly noted, this was
"perhaps referring to the difficulty of supplying your restaurants when
they turn up in a foreign country overnight". And the closure appears
permanent as McDonald’s has offered to move its Crimean employees to other jobs
in Ukraine and has thrown in three months’ free rental for good measure.
When I retweeted this nugget, if you’ll forgive the fast-food pun, one
Struan Lloyd responded: "They should close everywhere — no
nutrients." My former colleague, Douglas Gibson, suggested Crimeans could
now "eat Russian sausage instead".
I was immediately reminded of something else entirely. In 1999, when
globalisation was the new big thing and Russian expansionism appeared at an
end, the influential polemicist Thomas Friedman published a fat book on the
subject, The Lexus and the Olive Tree. I was impressed with its take on the
unprecedented integration of finance, markets, nation states and technology and
his account of how a new international order was replacing the Cold War order.
Some of Friedman’s assumptions have been proven wrong, not the least his
underestimation of the rise of Cold War warrior Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin.
But one, at least, has been triumphantly vindicated, as the weekend
disappearance of the Big Mac from Crimean menus proves.
Friedman devotes a chapter to "The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict
Prevention". Having travelled the world back then and munched hamburgers
throughout, he came to a fascinating, if somewhat indigestible, conclusion:
"No two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each
other since each got its McDonald’s."
He even tested this idea with executives at (I am not kidding)
"Hamburger University", McDonald’s research and training facility in
Oakbrook, Illinois. They confirmed his thesis, that "when a country
reaches the level of economic development where it has a middle class big
enough to support a McDonald’s network, it becomes a McDonald’s country. And
people in McDonald’s countries don’t like to fight wars anymore, they prefer to
wait in line for burgers."
Crimea is an imperfect fit for this thesis, but it roughly works. The
closure of the burger chain happened there after the forcible annexation by
Russia, but it broadly suggests that peace is the prerequisite for the
continued existence of the golden arches.
One of the postapartheid dividends was the arrival of the Big Mac in
South Africa in November 1995, only after the first democratic election and
South Africa had bedded down its new constitutional order.
The company’s website says the roll-out — we are approaching our 200th
McDonald’s store — had been unprecedented, with 30 stores opened in a record 23
months. Of some interest, and undoubtedly useful for his pension pot, is that
African National Congress supremo Cyril Ramaphosa has been, since March 2011,
the development licensee here driving its expansion. If he has as much success
in harvesting votes as in his investment in flipping burgers, then perhaps his
party will do better next month than predicted.
With the weekend news that the Nigerian economy has overtaken South
Africa’s as Africa’s largest, I decided to apply Friedman’s thesis to this
country of 169-million people.
There is not a single McDonald’s in Nigeria. According to McDonald’s CEO
Don Thompson, the company was only now "looking at Nigeria".
Perhaps this underscores how not just fast foods but also national
statistics should be accompanied with a giant health warning. For Nigeria
relies almost entirely for its economic wellbeing, or at least for 80% of
government revenue, on its vast oil resources.
And the recent forced departure of its central bank chief, Lamido
Sanusi, by President Goodluck Jonathan, tells its own sorry tale. He was fired,
essentially, for presenting to parliament evidence that more than $20bn had
gone missing from the state oil company, and that a figure close to the
president was a suspect in this misappropriation.
So, for South Africa, our addiction to fast food triggers both health
and economic warnings. On Monday, Peter Bruce eloquently explained our
chronic dependence on foreign investment, and Business Day’s editorial
was a baleful reminder that we can’t consume and spend our way out of our
economic difficulty. Still, when you next see the golden arches of McDonald’s,
it’s worth remembering they are evidence of our peace dividend.
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