A follow-up to my Africa Day reflection—by Latifah Ajetunmobi
On Monday I asked you to be proud of where you come from. To carry your Africanness through every airport you pass through. To teach your children the language of their grandmothers.
Today I have to ask you something harder.
I have to ask you to be angry.
Because while we were lighting our candles for Africa Day, the same continent we are celebrating is still being treated as a dumping ground by the same powers who once dragged our ancestors across the Atlantic in chains. The crime has changed shape. The targets have not.
And the most painful part? Many of the products targeting our children are sold to us in pretty packaging by trusted multinational brands, with our own children’s faces on the labels.
Key Takeaways
- Nestlé Cerelac in Africa contains up to 7.5g added sugar per serving; the same product in Europe has zero.
- Nestlé Nigeria’s Milo contains 52.2 g of sugar per 100g;Australia has a reduced-sugar version.
- UK Fanta was reformulated to 4.5g sugar/100 ml after the 2018 sugar tax; the Nigerian version was not
- Pfizer’s 1996 Trovan trial in Kano killed 11 children.
- British American Tobacco has sold higher-tar cigarettes in African markets since the 1990s
They came for our babies
In November 2025, the Swiss investigative NGO Public Eye published a damning report on Nestlé’s flagship infant cereal, Cerelac. Their laboratory analyzed over 100 Cerelac samples from 20 African countries.
The findings:
- Over 90% of Cerelac products sold in Africa contained added sugar.
- The highest level was 7.5 grams of added sugar per serving — almost two sugar cubes — in a product marketed for babies as young as six months old in Kenya.
- The same Cerelac sold in Switzerland, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom contains zero added sugar.
A South African researcher quoted in the report put it plainly: “This isn’t just about taste. It’s about engineering addiction from the cradle.”
19 African civil society organisations across 13 countries signed an open letter demanding Nestlé stop. They called it what it is: a colonialist practice, fuelling diabetes and childhood obesity on a continent where healthcare is already stretched thin.
Nestlé disputes the findings and insists their nutritional standards are “consistent across all countries.” The lab results say otherwise.
They came for our school children
If you grew up in Nigeria or Ghana, you grew up drinking Milo. It is the green tin on every kitchen counter. The drink we packed into flasks for school trips. The breakfast that was supposed to make our children “strong and smart.”
In March 2026, public health advocate Osinakachi Akuma Kalu — a Fellow of the World Academy of Medical Sciences — analysed the label on Nestlé Nigeria’s Milo and found something that should stop every Nigerian parent in their tracks:
52.2 grams of sugar per 100 grams of Milo.
That is more than half the powder. By weight. Sugar.
Meanwhile, Nestlé Australia sells a Milo with 30% less added sugar, and Nestlé Singapore offers a reduced-sugar version too. The technology exists. The recipes exist. The will to deploy them in Nigerian markets does not.
As Kalu put it, “If Nestlé can reduce sugar in Southeast Asia, can sell reduced-sugar Milo in Australia and New Zealand, and can discuss science-based sugar reduction globally, then Nigerian parents deserve to know why the Nigerian formulation still sits where it does.”
The green tin on your kitchen counter is not what your grandmother thought it was.
They came for our teenagers
In 2018, the United Kingdom introduced a Soft Drinks Industry Levy—a sugar tax. The threshold was 5g of sugar per 100ml. Anything above paid the levy.
Within months, Coca-Cola reformulated Fanta, Sprite, and Dr Pepper for the UK market to fall below the threshold. UK Fanta dropped to 4.5g of sugar per 100ml. UK Sprite to 4.3g per 100ml. Reformulated, cheaper, profitable.
The same companies that swore for years they “could not” reduce sugar without losing customers, reduced it overnight when the law made them.
In Nigeria, where the sugar-sweetened beverage tax is just 10 naira per litre (about 2 US cents), Fanta and Sprite retain their original, higher-sugar formulations. The same brand. The same logo. The same advert featuring smiling young people. Different recipe.
Sub-Saharan African consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages rose 72% between 2008 and 2022. In Nigeria alone, it rose 123%. We are now the world’s fourth-largest consumer of sugar-sweetened beverages. The rates of obesity, diabetes, and hypertension are climbing right alongside.
When the law makes them reduce sugar, they reduce sugar. When it doesn’t, they don’t. That is not science. That is policy avoidance dressed in a corporate suit.
They came for our patients
If the sugar stories made me angry, the next one breaks my heart every time I tell it.
In 1996, during one of the worst meningitis epidemics in Nigerian history—an outbreak that killed over 12,000 children—the American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer arrived in Kano with an experimental antibiotic called Trovan.
The drug had never been tested on children. It had shown serious side effects in adults, including liver damage and cartilage abnormalities.
Pfizer set up a testing site beside the Doctors Without Borders treatment area and enrolled approximately 200 Kano children, between three months and eighteen years old, into the trial. Parents were not told it was an experiment. Many believed their children were simply receiving treatment.
11 children died. Many more were left with paralysis, blindness, deafness, and lifelong neurological damage.
A Nigerian federal panel later found Pfizer guilty of conducting human trials without informed consent. The ethical approval letter Pfizer submitted to the US FDA to support its drug application was found to be falsified—the hospital where the trial took place had no ethics committee at the time. Pfizer eventually settled with the families of the deceased children for $175,000 per child in 2011. It has never admitted wrongdoing.
Those Kano children would be in their thirties today. Some are still alive. Still disabled. They are not history. They are our neighbours.
They came for our smokers
In 1990, a Sunday Times “Insight” investigation exposed British American Tobacco for operating, in their own words, “one standard for the West and another for the Third World.”
The investigation found BAT was selling cheaper cigarettes to lower-income African consumers with significantly higher levels of tar and nicotine than the same brands sold in Europe. Independent tests showed that 80% of BAT’s Kenyan cigarette brands contained more tar than their British equivalents. An internal BAT memo admitted some Kenyan cigarettes contained up to 20mg of tar—when the European average was 13mg.
More tar. More nicotine. More addiction. Aimed at the people with the least access to healthcare and the weakest cessation support.
That is not a market. That is a target.
The pattern
If this was one company, it would be a scandal. If it was two companies, it would be a coincidence. When it is Nestlé, Coca-Cola, Pfizer, British American Tobacco—across decades, across products, across the continent—it is not coincidence.
It is a pattern.
Wherever regulation is weak, the recipe gets worse. Wherever oversight is strong, the recipe gets better. The same factories, the same scientists, the same brand names—but a different formula depending on whether the local government has teeth.
This is what modern colonialism looks like. Not gunboats. Boardroom decisions about which market gets the safer Fanta.
But let us also tell the truth about ourselves
It would be too easy to point only at these multinationals. They are guilty. They are not alone.
These corporations get away with double standards in Africa because our own leaders let them.
Weak consumer protection laws. Regulators who can be persuaded with a phone call. Customs officers who can be paid. Politicians who prioritise corporate investment dollars over the bodies of their own citizens. African governments are competing to be “business friendly” by lowering the very protections their people most need.
There is hope here too. In November 2025, the Nigerian Senate held a public hearing on raising the sugar-sweetened beverage tax from 10 naira per litre to 130 naira per litre — a 13-fold increase modeled on World Health Organization recommendations. South Africa already has a working sugar tax. Civil society groups like CAPPA (Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa) are leading the fight. Other African countries are watching.
The question is whether we, as citizens, will push our leaders forward—or let the industry lobbyists pull them back.
What we can do—starting today
This is not a piece I want to leave you in despair with. Anger without action becomes bitterness. So here is what I am asking:
- Read the labels. Especially baby food, formula, Milo, Cerelac, and soft drinks. Compare what you are feeding your child in Lagos with what the same brand sells in London or Sydney. The information is online, and the difference will shock you.
- Vote with the little power you have. Choose African-made alternatives where they exist. Boil ogi, sorghum, groundnut, and sesame—the foods our grandmothers used to grow strong children before sugar was sold to us as nutrition.
- Demand accountability from your leaders. Write to NAFDAC (Nigeria), KEBS (Kenya), the FDA (Ghana), and SAHPRA (South Africa). Support the Nigerian SSB tax increase. Ask why our standards differ from Europe’s. Ask, and keep asking.
- Support the watchdogs. Public Eye, IBFAN, CAPPA, and the African civil society coalitions named in the Cerelac open letter—these are the people doing the work. Share their reports. Amplify their voices.
- Teach your children to read critically. Not just to read words—to read what is hidden in fine print, in shipping manifests, in trade agreements. The next generation needs media literacy and consumer literacy as urgently as it needs math.
Africa Day means something
Africa Day is not only a day to wear our colors and post our quotes. It is a day to remember that we are still defending ourselves from old enemies wearing new uniforms.
The chains have been replaced by boardroom decisions. The slave ship has been replaced by the shipping container of cheap cigarettes, sugar-laden cereal, sugar-laden milk drinks, sugar-laden sodas, expired drugs, and electronic waste.
But the cargo is still us.
And the answer is still the same as it has always been: we organise, we educate ourselves, we refuse, and we demand better.
Africa is not a dumping ground.
Africa is home.
— Latifah
This piece was inspired by a video shared by @spearhead on Instagram—please go follow and amplify their work. They are part of a wider movement of African voices doing the difficult labor of telling the truth about who profits from our pain.
Latifah Ajetunmobi is a certified Parent & Teen Coach, registered nurse, midwife and mental health nurse. She is the author of The Phone-Free Teenager and Beyond the Goat Pen: An African Woman’s Journey. She writes on family, identity, and the systems that shape African lives.
Sources cited:
- Public Eye, Sugar Scandal: In Africa, Nestlé is still putting profit ahead of babies’ health (November 2025)
- Business Remarks Nigeria, Health Expert Challenges Nestlé Over High Sugar Content in Nigerian Milo (March 2026)
- Action on Sugar, International Sugar-Sweetened Soft Drink Survey and UK Soft Drinks Industry Levy reformulation data
- BeverageDaily, Fanta’s fractured formula—how sugar taxes and colour bans rewrite the recipe (November 2025)
- Premium Times / All Africa, Nigerian Senate hearing on SSB excise tax (November 2025)
- Brookings Institution, What do Pfizer’s 1996 drug trials in Nigeria teach us about vaccine hesitancy?
- Abdullahi v. Pfizer, Inc. — US court records, 2011 settlement
- Tobacco Tactics (University of Bath), British American Tobacco in Africa: A History of Double Standards
- Sunday Times Insight investigation, 1990