Word: yakubu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...easy enough to buy a smoke at Isa Yakubu's grocery store on a busy street in Lagos, Nigeria. Never mind if you don't have much money. Most local merchants are happy to break open a pack and sell cigarettes one at a time - single sticks, as they're known - for about 10 Nigerian naira, or 7 cents. "St. Moritz is the most popular brand," says Yakubu. "But [people] also like Rothmans and Benson & Hedges...
...Single sticks go fast at 7 cents each - an especially good price point for kids. And while Yakubu says he doesn't sell to children, other shopkeepers do. About 25% of teens - some as young as 13 - use tobacco in some parts of Nigeria, double the smoking rate of Nigerian men, and many pick up the habit by age 11. That's a demographic powder keg, one that means big trouble if you're a health expert and big promise if you're a tobacco executive. Both sides agree on one thing, though: across all of Africa, cigarettes...