By Ishaya Ibrahim, News Editor
The alcoholic beverage industry is facing an existential threat. Profits are declining for the mult-billion naira companies like Nigerian Breweries, Guinness and other established brands.
The impact of business decline for these big brands is already telling on the entertainment industry as evident in the lack of sponsorship for some of their popular reality shows.
The poor business outlook in the alcoholic industry is not the result of decrease of consumers of alcohol, but combination of economic downturn and the emergence of an alternative intoxicant called Shekpe, a loose name for the many locally brewed gins in the Nigerian market.
Shekpe, originally called Ogogoro, has many variants in the market. They are affordable and offer levels of intoxication, but pose severe risk to the liver and vital organs of the body, according to experts.
Ogogoro is a drink extracted locally from palm trees. It is consumed for pleasure and used for rituals in marriages burials and at naming ceremonies.
But Ogogoro is very harsh to the taste bud. This makes it slightly different from Shekpe, which is more like the counterfeit of the Alomo Bitters, a herbal based alcoholic drink produced in Ghana.
Alomo is popular not only in Ghana but also in Nigeria, Togo, Ivory Coast South Africa and Burkina Faso. But its popularity has led to a lot of counterfeiting of its product by cheap brands claiming to have the same herbal and alcoholic effects.
In Nigeria, Shekpe, has taken the place of Alomo because the many products under this generic name also claim to have the same bitter ingredients as Alomo, a herbal mixture which producers claim, reduce the impact of sugar in the body.
Shekpe offers the same intoxication at a very low cost, hence their preference by many consumers, even though it comes with a higher health risk.
But the markets for these products which come in sachet, plastics and bottle packs have left the big brands bleeding.
Nigerian Breweries, for instance, has never had it so rough with the influx of these cheap intoxicants into the alcoholic market, our correspondent gathered from Distributors who pleaded anonymity.
In 2019, the brewery giant reported a profit after tax of N16 billion. This was a far cry from its average profit, which stood at N40 billion.
Guinness Nigeria Plc has also not been having it easy. In its 2019 result, it only managed to get a N3.56 billion profit, a shortfall of N1.08 billion from the 2018 operations.
The invention of Shekpe has created a crisis for the big breweries who seem to have lost the patronage of the low income class. This category of consumers with low purchasing power, make up the majority of alcohol consumers.
Shekpe is also easily available for the consumer who could easily purchase them in kiosks, beer parlours, and restaurants or from hawkers. Experts warn on the dangers of consuming these unscientific brews. Some illegal producers who had been apprehended by the Police had on occasions confessed merely mixing ethanol or other chemicals and colourings which they pass off to consumers as Bitters. Despite these obvious infractions in the production of these drinks, their patronage remains on the increase, due largely to the fact that they come cheap and handy to the patrons as against the established brands that are considered expensive.
Their aggressive distribution network has become the selling niche for these products which are relatively cheaper than the bottled or canned beer but whose production standards remain untrustworthy.
