The levy imposed on alcohol was implemented on 1 November 2008 after KBL and BBL withdrew their court case against the proposed measure.

In June, SABMiller hope to launch a commercial trial in Angola of a new formulation of its N’Gola brand - one that replaces maize with cassava, a locally grown root vegetable. SAB plans to use cassava – a rich form of starch – to brew a pilsener style lager using 60 percent barley and 40 percent cassava, it was reported.

Malt beverages are a huge success in Nigeria. There are already more than 14 brands in the market. These include Malta Guinness, Maltina , Amstel (NB),Vitamalt, Maltex, Nasmalt, Hi-Malt (Consolidated), and Maltonic (Sona), it was reported. Nevertheless, Heineken was not interested in buying yet another malt beverage brand. Heineken’s aim was to take the brewery off the market, people familiar with the situation say.

SABMiller’s new beverage plant is the first local manufacturing facility in Southern Sudan’s capital city, Juba and has the capacity to brew 180,000 hl of clear beer and 60,000 hl of carbonated soft drinks annually. Up until now, Southern Sudan’s eleven million people only had access to beers and soft drinks imported from neighbouring countries.

The background: Heineken and Diageo bought a stake in NBL in 2003 from Interbrew. Since then they have attacked South African Breweries in neighbouring South Africa with their Windhoek beers.

Let’s hope the anti-alcohol lobby does not read this. In their eyes, any form of alcohol is bad. However, some alcohol is worse than others and for as long as consumers continue to enjoy a nightcap or two, governments have to make sure somehow that their voters are protected from toxic moonshine.

No one in established democracies needs ethics training to know that providing a member of parliament with one million dollars, a Rolls Royce, rugs, antiques, furniture, yacht club fees and vacation expenses in exchange for, well, favouring a certain company, is committing bribery. But businesses can participate in the political process legitimately and legally.

According to local media reports, the American soft drink Coca-Cola has become a symbol of Ethiopia’s deepening financial troubles. On 28 March, the beverage started flowing again after a pause of two weeks. The East African Bottling Share Company (EABSC), Coca-Cola’s local bottler only restarted distributing the soft drink after it had received sufficient foreign exchange to import crown corks from Kenya.

Both South Sudan and Ethiopia are far from politically stable. The government in Khartoum has yet to acknowledge the peace treaty brokered in 2005 between the Arab- and Muslim-dominated north and the mainly Christian or Animist, non-Arab south. Whenever there are clashes between southern and northern soldiers, the semi-autonomous region of South Sudan worries that the national army seeks to provoke a new civil war.

Let’s put it this way: the Sudanese government in Khartoum will not like it. After all, it introduced Islamic Sharia law in 1983 and banned the sale of alcohol. But what can it do? Tensions between northern and southern Sudan over disputed oilfields, with both sides apparently arming for war, are still running high, even after a peace deal in 2005, which allowed the southern rebels to form a secular government. Nevertheless, having their own brewery must have been high on the former rebels’ agenda or they would not have allowed SABMiller into their country.