KHARTOUM — Almost 20 years of U.S. sanctions on Sudan aren’t stopping Yasser Moustafa from tucking into fried chicken from a red and white-decorated restaurant with a logo of a mustachioed senior citizen.
Stepping into Kafory Fried Chicken here in Sudan’s capital, the 43-year-old engineer could choose anything from a crispy-chicken sandwich and Coke at 30 Sudanese pounds ($5.22) to a 15-piece bucket for seven times that price. That’s expensive for the country, blighted by decades of armed rebellions, where the average working person earns $4.80 a day and the nearest African outlet of Kentucky Fried Chicken is in Aswan, Egypt, about 590 miles to the north.
“I have a good customer base and I’m looking into opening more branches,” Atef Abdullah, the restaurant’s owner, said in an Aug. 16 interview. He gestured at the company emblem of a grinning, avuncular gentleman: “That’s a picture of my brother, not Colonel Sanders.”
Kafory is one of a growing number of fast-food options in Sudan’s capital, where eateries inspired by U.S. giants such as KFC and Starbucks compete with franchises of South Africa-based Famous Brands’ Debonairs Pizza and Steers, which sells hamburgers. While U.S. sanctions, in place since 1997 for alleged sponsorship of terrorism, have kept the major brands out, U.S.-styled snacks have found a market with Khartoum’s small number of wealthy residents.
Sudan’s middle class has seen a “notable, and consistent” rise over the past decade and comprises more than 820,000 households, or 14 percent of the country’s total, according to a July 2014 report by Johannesburg, South Africa-based Standard Bank Group. By 2030, that’s expected to more than double to 1.9 million households, or about a quarter of the population.
A 2012 report by the Mc Kinsey Global Institute ranked Khartoum fifth in its worldwide list of cities expected to see the highest growth in young entry-level consumers between 2010 and 2025. The Nigerian city of Lagos came first and Tanzania’s commercial capital, Dar es Salaam, second.
Such estimates come even as Sudan’s $74 billion economy feels the aftershocks of South Sudan’s secession in 2011, which deprived Khartoum of three-quarters of the formerly united country’s oil reserves and led the government to trim subsidies, sparking protests. The economy grew 3.6 percent in 2014, driven by agriculture, services and the mining industry, the government said in July.
