|
Fuel Siphoning Hits Kampala
Kampala, Dec 29, 2008 (New Vision/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX) --
CALL it playing with fire. That is precisely what these young men are doing.
Our team sighted them siphoning fuel from a moving tanker and carrying it away in five-litre jerrycans and polythene bags (kaveera) in the middle of a traffic jam at Kampala's Industrial Area. Bizarre as it may sound, this activity goes on in the city every day.
Gangs of mean-looking young men, some of them marijuana smokers, follow tanks and siphon fuel when the trucks slow down at a corner, jam, pothole or railway crossing.
Some of the group members follow the targeted truck from the sides, watching for any trouble so that they can alert their colleagues who cling onto the truck as they siphon the fuel.
The vice is a common occurence in the Kampala Industrial Area, where fuel companies Total, Shell and Caltex/Chevron have depots.
But the fuel dealers insist that their tankers are sealed, so no one can siphon the fuel.
"Whereas the seal is intended to protect the fuel quality, it also protects it from thieves. It is therefore very hard to siphon the fuel unless the truck is faulty," says Daniel Segal, the Kobil Uganda managing director.
Another source told Saturday Vision that when offloading fuel at filling stations, the drivers and turnboys connive to reserve some fuel in the tanker, which is later siphoned out.
Whatever the mechanism, fuel siphoning in a busy city centre poses a risk of fire, Lawrence Adima, the Police Fire Brigade chief, warns.
"Fire can start at the source of the siphoning and it kills people. The culprits are usually the first victims," he says, citing the 2005 incident where people who had come to siphon fuel from a truck that overturned in Mabira Forest were burnt when fire broke out.
On February 14, 2005, 42 people burned to death after a mini-bus, a fuel tanker and a Suzuki car collided at Lwankima in Mabira Forest, along Jinja Road.
In 2001 in the eastern town of Iganga, over 35 people were killed and 80 injured after a tanker truck carrying gasoline crashed and caught fire. The Police said the people were killed while trying to siphon fuel from the leaking
vehicle.
However, despite several warnings on fuel siphoning, people have not taken heed. Former Police spokesperson, Assuman Mugenyi, attributed it to poverty.
"As long as you have poor people, you cannot rule out people committing crime.
"The criminal behaviour remains in them, so they want to find ways of making ends meet. And if they can get some few jerry cans of fuel and sell them, definitely it means they can buy some few things," Mugenyi noted after the Iganga fire incident.
Fuel siphoning has also been reported in other countries of Africa, Asia and Europe.
In Bangkok and Thailand, it involves a well organised racket of drivers and dealers, who resale the siphoned fuel to petrol stations.
There, a jerrycan of siphoned fuel is referred to as one pig.
Various companies in Bangkok have started fitting their trucks with a device that monitors the position of each vehicle at any one time.
The device, which uses Global Positioning System, enables the driver's bosses to know how long he spends at each stop. The drivers can then be queried for spending too long at one stop.
[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
|
INDUSTRIES
Activate Email 
Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs & Service Providers at the INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference and EXPO East, January 20-22, 2010. Miami, FL.
