Fuel crisis : towards the resignation of the Burundian population?

Lamentations no longer have a place among the Burundian population. No solution is possible to deal with the ongoing lack of fuel. In the commercial city Bujumbura where United Nations agencies and the central administration are concentrated, residents have chosen walking as an alternative for several months. They have become accustomed to it. INFO SOS Médias Burundi

Many are those who leave home in the morning and return in the evening. Previously, queues were mainly observed in the car parks in the city center, but currently, the situation is also present in the northern and southern neighborhoods. People can spend more than an hour waiting for the rare buses that manage to find fuel to come to the aid of passengers going to work or school. Some end up going there on foot.

“I usually arrive at the car park at 5:45 a.m. If there are no buses until 6:30 a.m, we decide to walk down,” says a student from the Musaga area in the south of the commercial capital.

In the city center, before 10 a.m, people are surprised to see buses lined up in the car parks as if everything was fine. After that time, things start to change.

“Luckily for us, when we show up in town in school uniform after class, we are privileged. There is a row reserved for students,” another student seems to rejoice.

Some people never tire of spending hours and hours on the rows in the hope of finding some means of transport. But others have already got it into their heads that they are not going to waste time waiting for buses. Thousands of residents prefer to walk. These are mainly inhabitants of neighborhoods close to the city center. They no longer complain because they are used to living like this.

Paradoxically, fuel is sold on the black market but in secret. A 20-liter can costs between 250,000 and 350,000 Burundi francs.

At petrol stations, it is still deserted, pumps are no longer working – no movement. Burundian authorities prefer to “no longer lie” and “not keep Burundians in endless hope”. No one reassures the population that has been suffering from a lack of fuel for almost 47 months, things having deteriorated at the beginning of this year, not even the talkative president who had reassured that Burundi’s stocks at the port of Dar-es-Salaam (Tanzania) are full of huge quantities of fuel but that there was a lack of trucks to transport this rare commodity to the soil of the small East African nation.