DAILY TRUST
Sitting on top of a yellow jerry can of fuel, Jeannine waits for customers on a sidewalk in Benin’s economic capital Cotonou, but business is slow. The motorbikes and cars she normally supplies are no longer stopping to stock up on her cheap gasoline, which is smuggled in from neighbouring Nigeria.
Since Nigeria’s new president Bola Ahmed Tinubu abruptly ended his country’s long-standing subsidy on petrol two weeks ago, prices of black market fuel over the border in Benin have also doubled.”
Since this morning, barely five people have stopped,” said Jeanine. “Everyone prefers to go to the petrol station now.”
Two weeks ago, a litre of “Kpayo,” the smuggled gasoline sold on the side of Beninese roads, doubled from 350 to 700 CFA francs (0.5 to 1 euro). That is now higher than the petrol in service stations at the market price of around 650 CFA a litre.
In Nigeria, fuel prices have also tripled since Tinubu ended the subsidies, with food, transport and power prices feeling the knock-on effect. Ending the subsidy was the first measure taken by Tinubu, who sees the subsidies as unsustainable financial waste costing the state billions of dollars a year, and allowing massive smuggling of subsidised gasoline to neighbouring countries.
“Why should we (…) feed the smugglers and be the Santa Claus of neighbouring countries,” Tinubu said last week, justifying the decision, which has been unpopular in Nigeria.
For decades, Nigeria’s low-cost gasoline has been transported illegally by road to its neighbours, primarily Benin, where it is resold on the black market by a multitude of informal sellers.
“You know, this fuel helps feed thousands of people in Benin,” said Jeannine, a 48-year-old widow with five children, who says she does not have savings “to start a new business.”
The scale of the trafficking is such that the price of taxi fares has almost doubled in Cotonou. In Cameroon, another neighbour of Nigeria, several motorcycle taxi unions have gone on strike in protest.
‘Pray to God’
Victorien Assogba Kossi, wearing a yellow shirt like all the zemidjans (motorbike taxis) of Cotonou, wonders “what is wrong with Nigeria…?”
“Is it because the border is closed?” asks the driver who has never heard of Nigerian subsidies.
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