By Ali Idrissou-Toure
COTONOU, Sep 10 2004 (IPS)

Government’s attempt to control the illegal sale of petroleum products in Benin is meeting with failure due to widespread unemployment in the country. The products, which include gasoline and diesel, are often smuggled in from neighboring Nigeria.

As a result of the illicit trade, fuel distribution companies have lost an estimated 50 percent share of the Beninese market. Government is also out of pocket “15 billion CFA francs (about 28 million dollars) in uncollected taxes,” says Soumanou Moudjaido, chair of the national commission charged with cleaning up the market for petroleum products.

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 vapors which people are then forced to breathe,” said Moudjaido recently, during a press conference held in the economic hub of Cotonou.

In addition, lives have been lost in fires which broke out amongst fuel containers stored in houses with flammable roofs.

Black market gasoline 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 gasoline costs about 66 cents at the pump, only 52 to 56 cents is needed to buy the same amount of fuel on the black market.

Efforts by authorities to clamp down on the sale of kpayo have met with vigorous resistance from vendors – who have few alternative means of earning a living. Last month, these sellers took to the streets of the capital – Porto-Novo.

Some protestors barricaded the city’s main roads, burned tires in intersections and hurled stones at police.

They also smashed traffic lights and police vehicles, and partially burned down 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 100 kilometers from Nigeria, sub-Saharan Africa’s largest oil producer – is an important source for the black market fuel which is sold in Benin.)

Despite the role of certain vendors in the violence, public sympathy appears to be on their side. Many people believe that government should have tried to negotiate with the sellers, who 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, who 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 in the tens of thousands.

Black market fuel became so widely available that the National Petroleum Product Merchandising Company (SONACOP) was unable to build enough service stations for the country. The 1999 privatisation of SONACOP and the liberalization 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 not one exists along the 30-kilometre road linking the capital to Cotonou. Instead, the road is literally flooded with informal vendors.

“The government for so long had a laissez-faire attitude toward this illegal activity, which feeds thousands of families, that it would now be…difficult to suddenly do away with it,” Assouman Aboudou, a member of parliament, told IPS.

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 poor is actually much higher.

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