Where Coca-Cola succeeds, so does an economy, according to the Economist, whose general policy of life and love is, “You broke your leg? To fix that, just liberalize your market.”

When Coke can’t sell:

At a macro-level, when Coke fails, the country whose market it is trying to penetrate usually fails too. Coca-Cola’s bottling plant in Eritrea hardly works because the country’s totalitarian government makes it impossible to import the needed syrup. The factory in Somalia sputtered on heroically during years of fighting but finally gave out when its sugar was pinched by pirates and its workers were held up by gunmen. Mr Cummings admits that Coca-Cola is “on life support” in Zimbabwe.

A correlation between Coke sales and ethnic violence:

“We see political instability first because we go down as far as we can into the market,” says Alexander Cummings, head of Coca-Cola’s Africa division. The ups and downs during Kenya’s post-election violence this year could be traced in sales of Coke in Nairobi’s slums and in western Kenya’s villages.

The article gives the space of a sentence to potential problems with Coke in Africa – unhealthy, bad for the environment, blah blah blah – but also points out that a Coke is cheaper than a newspaper in most places in Africa.

This makes me think something is wrong with newspapers.