Bujumbura-Municipality : vegetable producers also affected by the fuel crisis

Fruit sellers in the neighborhoods of Bujumbura no longer know where to turn. The lack of fuel affects the transportation of products. INFO SOS Médias Burundi

SOS Médias Burundi followed Pascasie, originally from Nyambuye in Isale district, Burumbura province (formerly Rural). She has been raising her six children alone since her husband left her.

She usually “gets out of bed” at 4 a.m., takes a motorbike and goes to the COTEBU market where she stocks up on avocados, banana fruits, tomatoes, oranges, and various vegetables which she then loads into a car taxi. to reach its display in Mutanga Nord. The market and its workplace are located in the north of the commercial city Bujumbura. According to her, she risks abandoning her lifelong livelihood.

Prices have almost tripled at COTEBU market as its items come from within by vehicles.

But fuel is obtainable at a high price, and getting it gives headache! The motorbike and the taxi in turn present her with large bills for his transport.

When she passes these costs on to her items to maintain her profit margin, her regular customers, including shopkeepers, balk.

They refuse its prices because households are ignoring the new prices of these shopkeepers, considered excessive.

Whereas before Pascasie easily sold three baskets of tomatoes every day, now she can no longer empty even one. Hence her grumbling.

What else can she do to feed her offspring?

She is turning her eyes to the country’s leaders so that they can find a response to this continuing fuel shortage as quickly as possible.

However, People like Pascasie penalized by this crisis are legion. There are many of them in almost every district of the commercial capital, these women who spend all their days in front of their fruit and vegetable stalls, sometimes breastfeeding their little ones under the shade of an umbrella, thus dodging the heat of the summer sunlight and the heat of Bujumbura.

And everyone we met had the same request on their lips : that the authority put an end to the fuel crisis.

If therefore activities at the bottom of the national economy find themselves paralyzed, what about macro-finance in Burundi?, observers ask.

Without fuel, this fossil energy of which the country is cruelly lacking, all the cogs of the country’s economy are slowing down.