There are indications that PZ Cussons Plc may leave Africa after sales plunged in its Nigeria operation. PZ Cussons has put its Africa business under review, potentially pivoting away from the region in which it was founded to invest in its remaining business and pay down debt, Bloomberg reports.

According to media platform, the British soap maker was set up in Sierra Leone 140 years ago and now gets almost 30 per cent of its sales from Africa, even after a 48 per cent decline over the past year. With annual sales of around £500 million ($622 million), it is spread across many geographies and product lines. It also operates in Europe, the Americas and the Asia-Pacific region.

Chief executive officer, Jonathan Myers, said: “We have to have an eye on the future as well as a respect for the past. There could be many permutations of the outcome, which could include a change in ownership. We are going to be objective and not emotional in how we make this decision.”

The company’s shares rose five per cent on April 24, 2024, but down 50 per cent over the past 12 months.
PZ Cussons also plans to sell fake tan brand, St. Tropez. It said the label has grown significantly since the company bought it in 2010, adding that significant long-term growth potential remains in the US and new markets. It could be worth £100 million, Investec analyst Matthew Webb said in a note.

Myers said that the company will focus on branded items for babies, as well as beauty and hygiene products, citing recent acquisition, Childs Farm, which makes toiletries for babies with sensitive skin as an example.

UK, australia, New Zealand and Indonesia are Myers’ priority markets. Following a strategic review, the board has decided that on top of the difficulties in Nigeria, the company is too complicated for its size. In a financial update, it cited “financial and human resources spread too thinly to generate consistent returns.”

In Nigeria, the company sells a range of products including Morning Fresh dishwashing liquid, refrigerators and cooking oil. The devaluation of the naira means sales fell sharply in pound terms. It also stoked inflation which has hit consumers’ purchasing power.

In March, regulators rejected PZ Cussons’s application to buy out the 27 per cent of its Nigerian arm that it does not own, in order to delist it. The regulator said the offer price of N23 per share was unfair.

The PZ Cussons Nigeria in a release by the company secretary, Olubukola Olonade-Agaga, said: “It notifies the Nigerian Exchange Limited and the investing public that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has declined the Company’s request for its No Objection to PZ Cussons (Holdings) Limited’s (the majority shareholder) intention to acquire the shares held by all the other shareholders of PZCN at an offer price of N23 per share.”

Meanwhile, challenges faced by local and multinational manufacturers in Nigeria have been power crisis, constant devaluation of naira, forex availability and stringent government policies.

Also, Unilever announced the exit of its home care and skin cleansing from Nigeria; in July 2023, Nigeria’s second-biggest drug producer and British pharmaceutical giant, GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Nigeria Plc, announced an end to manufacturing operations in Nigeria; French pharmaceutical multinational, Sanofi, announced its decision to quit Nigeria; in November, Equinor Nigeria Energy Company (ENEC), a Norwegian energy corporation which holds a 53.85 percent ownership in oil mining lease (OML) 128, including a 20.21 percent stake in the Agbami field, operated by Chevron, announced the sale of its Nigerian operations, and Procter & Gamble (P&G) announced its decision to shut manufacturing in Nigeria.

The president of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN), Francis Meshioye, recently said that some international manufacturing firms had already exited Nigeria as a result of the power crisis, coupled with the unpredict- ability of the country’s foreign exchange rate before it was recently unified.

He added that the N144 billion spent on alternative energy sources by manufacturers in 2022 impacted adversely on the operations of the group’s members.

PZ Cussons Plc put its Africa business under review, potentially pivoting away from the region in which it was founded to invest in its remaining business and pay down debt.

The British soap maker was set up in Sierra Leone 140 years ago and now gets almost 30% of its sales from Africa, even after a 48% decline over the past year. With annual sales of around £500 million ($622 million), it’s spread across many geographies and product lines. It also operates in Europe, the Americas and the Asia-Pacific region.

“We have to have an eye on the future as well as a respect for the past,” Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Myers said. “There could be many permutations of the outcome, which could include a change in ownership.”

“We’re going to be objective and not emotional in how we make this decision,” he added. The company’s shares rose 5% on Wednesday, but they’re down 50% over the past 12 months.

PZ Cussons also plans to sell fake tan brand St. Tropez. It said the label has grown significantly since the company bought it in 2010, adding that significant long-term growth potential remains in the US and new markets. It could be worth £100 million, Investec analyst Matthew Webb said in a note.

The company will focus on branded items for babies, as well as beauty and hygiene products, Myers said, citing recent acquisition Childs Farm which makes toiletries for babies with sensitive skin as an example. UK, australia, New Zealand and Indonesia are Myers’ priority markets.

Following a strategic review, the board has decided that on top of the difficulties in Nigeria, the company is too complicated for its size. In a financial update, it cited “financial and human resources spread too thinly to generate consistent returns.”

In Nigeria the company sells a range of products including Morning Fresh dishwashing liquid, refrigerators and cooking oil. The devaluation of the naira means sales fell sharply in pound terms. It also stoked inflation which has hit consumers’ capacity to spend.

In March, regulators rejected PZ Cussons’s application to buy out the 27% of its Nigerian arm that it doesn’t own, in order to delist it. The regulator said the offer price of 23 naira was unfair.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRuvgUWbN0A?si=noAAdiBsNPy4dzAW

Chris Oyakhilome: Nigerian pastor pushing malaria vaccine conspiracy theories

Dressed in his signature closed-neck suit, Pastor Chris Oyakhilome stared directly into the camera, declaring that "there was never a proof that vaccines ever worked".

Everyone had been "lied to" about vaccination, he said in the sermon broadcast on his church's YouTube channel in February.

Known as "Pastor Chris", the sixty-year-old is one of Africa's best-known evangelical preachers.

The BBC has reviewed dozens of his sermons from 2023 and 2024 and found that he has been spreading anti-vaccine messages to his followers, specifically targeting the new malaria vaccine as it is being distributed in African countries.

Malaria is a huge problem in Africa. About 95% of malaria-related deaths occurred on the continent in 2022, with children under five accounting for around 80% of the deaths, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

In the last six months, Pastor Oyakhilome's company has also produced at least five 20-minute anti-vaccine documentaries broadcast in church services or shared on his video streaming platform, evading social media companies' policies against anti-vaccine content.

The announcement last year of the rollout of a vaccine against malaria - after decades of trying - was hailed by experts as a major achievement that could save tens of thousands of lives.

According to the UN children's agency, Unicef, successful pilot vaccine campaigns since 2019 in Kenya, Ghana and Malawi caused a 13% drop in the deaths of children of eligible age.

But medical experts fear the influential pastor's far-reaching sermons might negatively affect vaccine take-up in Africa.

In August last year, he warned in a sermon of "an evil agenda that has been long in the making".

He then spread a conspiracy theory popular in the anti-vaccine community - that vaccines are a way of "depopulating the world".

He also falsely said that "malaria was never a problem to those in Africa".

"Spreading false information about vaccines, especially from influential figures like religious leaders, can contribute to the perpetuation of myths and misconceptions, further fuelling vaccine hesitancy.

"This can have devastating consequences for public health, particularly in the WHO African region where vaccine-preventable diseases occur frequently," a WHO spokesperson said.

Pastor Oyakhilome's remarks were included as one of the disinformation trends "to watch" ahead of the malaria vaccine rollout in a report released in March by the WHO-backed The Africa Infodemic Response Alliance.

We asked the pastor about his statements against vaccination through his company's and church's e-mails. We did not receive a response.

He founded the Christ Embassy church in Nigeria's main city, Lagos, in the 1990s and went on to amass hundreds of thousands of followers around the world.

In 2011, he was featured in Forbes magazine as one of Nigeria's richest pastors with an estimated net worth of $30m to $50m (£24m to £40m).

According to the magazine, the pastor's diverse business interests included newspapers, magazines, a local television station, a record label, satellite TV, hotels and extensive real estate.

His empire, named LoveWorld Inc, has since grown. It now includes a streaming service, a messaging app with over a million downloads on Google's app store and a microfinance bank.

Once a week, Pastor Oyakhilome preaches at the church's huge camp ground in Asese, along the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway.

When the BBC visited the church last November, hundreds of pastors from different nationalities filled its auditorium for an annual conference. Flags of dozens of countries were displayed inside.

His "massive online teachings and healing services" have a global attendance of "7 billion people", according to the Christ Embassy's website - this is highly unlikely given that the planet's population is estimated at eight billion.

Winnifred Ikhianosin, 25, is a regular at the church. She told the BBC she refuses to take vaccines.

"The man of God told us," she said. "And I have also done my research."

According to Ada Umenwaliri, associate director of the African Studies Centre at the US-based University of North Carolina, Pastor Oyakhilome has a "stronghold on his followers who are looking up to him".

"Pastors and religious leaders will always play a significant role in the choices their followers make," she added.

But poverty and the lack of health infrastructure in Africa could enable churches to have a greater hold over people when it came to vaccination, she said.

In an article published on the Nigerian news site, The Cable, last year, writer Julius Ogunro, who attended the pastor's church for over a decade, said: "We need to sound the alarm now. The agenda [that] Pastor Chris is pushing is potentially dangerous and has nothing to do with the Christian faith."

One name is repeated frequently by Pastor Oyakhilome: Bill Gates. The billionaire is one of the malaria vaccine's biggest backers, but has also been subject to vaccination conspiracy theories for years.

In a sermon in August 2023, the pastor broadcast a clip from a TED talk Bill Gates gave in 2010 as an example of "those who have an agenda for depopulation of the world".

While giving a talk on reducing carbon dioxide emissions, Mr Gates said: "First, we've got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15%."

His declaration was taken out of context by Pastor Oyakhilome. Mr Gates did not advocate for the world's depopulation.

He has clarified in the past that he saw population growth and health improvement as complementary: "When health improves, families choose to have less kids."

Mr Oyakhilome also said that the World Mosquito Program facility in Colombia belonged to the Gates Foundation, accusing it of producing genetically modified mosquitoes as a strategy for depopulation.

The mosquito factory, established to reduce the ability of mosquitoes to transmit viruses, belongs to a non-profit group of companies owned by Monash University in australia, and it has stressed that its method do not involve the use of genetically modified organisms.

Pastor Oyakhilome is no stranger to anti-vaccine disinformation. Recently he has also targeted the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, meant to protect women against cervical cancer.

"They have something else up their sleeve. It's not about cancer," he said during a service aired on 2 September 2023.

Nigeria began the mass vaccination campaign for girls in October 2023 in a bid to drastically reduce cervical cancer rates.

The disease claims the lives of over 8,000 women in Nigeria every year. In 2021, a major study funded by Cancer Research UK found the HPV vaccine was cutting cases of cervical cancer by nearly 90%.

In the past, Pastor Oyakhilome made multiple unfounded claims about anti-tetanus injections, polio vaccines, and other childhood immunisations.

The pastor also falsely stated that the messenger RNA vaccine alters the DNA.

But the vaccine does not alter people's DNA. It takes part of a virus's genetic material - or messenger RNA - to make the immune system learn to recognise it and produce antibodies.

During the Covid pandemic, Pastor Oyakhilome's church received a £125,000 ($155,000) fine from the British media regulator Ofcom.

It said his network Loveworld, broadcast in the UK, showed "misleading and potentially harmful statements about the coronavirus pandemic and vaccines".

Mr Ogunro, the writer who left the church, said he was worried about the pastor's influence.

"His claims about vaccination scare me. We need to find a way to regulate preachers like him."

The United States and Israel have the largest Jewish populations worldwide, with approximately 6.9 million and 6 million respectively. These two countries alone account for about 86% of the total global Jewish population. Europe, predominantly France, the United Kingdom, and Germany, also hosts a significant portion of the Jewish community.

1. Israel 6.9M
2. United States 6.0M
3. France 446.0K
4. Canada 393.5K
5. United Kingdom 292.0K
6. Argentina 175.0K
7. Russia 150.0K
8. Germany 118.0K
9. australia 118.0K
10. Brazil 91.5K
11. South Africa 52.0K
12. Hungary 47.0K
13. Ukraine 43.0K
14. Mexico 40.0K
15. Netherlands 30.0K
16. Belgium 29.0K
17. Italy 27.0K
18. Switzerland18.5K
19. Chile 16.0K
20. Uruguay 16.0K
21. Sweden 15.0K
22. Turkey 14.5K
23. Spain 13.0K
24. Austria 10.0K
25. Panama 10.0K