With more than 50% of population below poverty line, thousands driven into illicit trade
Benin unemployment fuels debate over illegal petroleum sales
September 13, 2004
By Ali Idrissou-Toure
Cotonou - The government's attempt to control the illegal sale of petroleum products in Benin is failing due to widespread unemployment in the country.
The products, which include petrol and diesel, are often smuggled in from neighbouring Nigeria.
As a result of the illicit trade, fuel distribution companies have lost an estimated 50 percent share of the Beninese market.
The government is also losing "15 billion CFA francs (R186 million) in uncollected taxes", says Soumanou Moudjaido, chair of the national commission charged with cleaning up the market for petroleum products
"We could have avoided these incidents if we'd had alternate ideas |
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Besides the economic reasons for abolishing illicit fuel sales, authorities also cite health concerns.
"Since black market products are poorly refined, they release into the atmosphere enormous quantities of toxic vapours, which people are then forced to breathe," Moudjaido said recently at a press conference held in the economic hub of Cotonou.
In addition, lives have been lost in fires that broke out among fuel containers stored in houses with flammable roofs.
Black market petrol is widely referred to as "kpayo", which means poor quality in the local Goun language.
Even so, most motorists and motorcyclists use it because it is cheaper than fuel sold at service stations.
While petrol costs about 66c at the pump, only 52c to 56c is needed to buy the same amount of fuel on the black market
"Government for long had a laissez faire attitude to his illegal captivity." |
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Efforts by authorities to clamp down on the sale of kpayo have met with vigorous resistance from vendors, which have few alternative means of earning a living.
Last month, these sellers took to the streets of the capital Porto-Novo. Some protesters barricaded the city's main roads, burned tires at intersections and hurled stones at police.
They also smashed traffic lights and police vehicles, and partially torched the home of Fatiou Akplogan, the minister of trade, industry and job promotion, who supervises the commission that aims to regulate the petroleum sector more closely.
Two people were killed and several injured in clashes with police who - according to officials - were obliged to use force to disperse the crowd.
Many people were taken in for questioning during the incident and large numbers of 50 litre gas tanks confiscated.
Porto-Novo, just 100km from Nigeria, sub-Saharan Africa's largest oil producer, is an important source for the black market fuel that is sold in Benin.
Despite the role of certain vendors in the violence, public sympathy appears to be on their side.
Many believe that the government should have tried to negotiate with the sellers, which serve as breadwinners for thousands of families hard-hit by unemployment.
Even Porto-Novo's mayor, Bernard Dossou, chipped in on behalf of the fuel vendors.
"We could have avoided these incidents if we'd had alternate employment ideas to propose to the vendors, which are entirely dependent on this trade to survive," he stated on Golfe-FM, a privately owned radio station.
Ever since the economic crisis of 1988 and 1989, when poverty and unemployment in Benin took a turn for the worse, illicit fuel sales had been tolerated by the authorities.
While there are no official statistics on the exact number of kpayo sellers, rough estimates put their number to the tens of thousands.
Black market fuel became so widely available that the National Petroleum Product Merchandising Company was unable to build enough service stations for the country.
The 1999 privatisation of the National Petroleum Product Merchandising Company and the liberalisation of the petroleum sector do not appear to have made a dent in illegal petrol sales.
Porto-Novo still makes do with just four petrol stations, while none exists along the 30km road linking the capital to Cotonou. Instead, the road is flooded with informal vendors.
"The government for so long had a laissez faire attitude towards this illegal activity, which feeds thousands of families, that it would now be ... difficult to suddenly do away with it," said Assouman Aboudou, a member of parliament.
More than 50 percent of Benin's 6.7 million people live below the poverty line of a dollar a day, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Analysis. Certain economists argue that the number of the poor is actually much higher.
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