#Gabon : In Gabon, the period of major holiday departures occurs this year in a context of fuel shortages in service stations in major urban centers such as Libreville.
Between the difficulty of finding what you are looking for, and the anxiety of driving on the reserve, road hauliers no longer know where to turn. “We cannot travel because there is no fuel. Sometimes you are told to iron and when you iron there is nothing. You see, it blocks everything. It’s a mess, it’s not normal, we are a producing country. They even let you know at the stations that you are not filling up. Other stations have them, but they’ll tell you they don’t. Simply because they have their privileged customers”, is indignant Joseph Minko, road transporter.
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For a month, the government has taken restrictive measures: limitation of the full and prohibition for the industrialists to be used in the stations. And in this period of great mobility, it is a real headache for road professionals, such as Aboubakar Adamou, manager in a land travel agency located at the Pk8 bus station in Libreville. “Lack of fuel in sufficient quantity for our entire fleet, we are often forced to cancel certain lines and make a refund to customers who have already made their reservation,” he explains. This is a shortfall for the agency, which has already lost 25 to 30% of its turnover in the space of just a few days.
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Despite an annual subsidy of petroleum products estimated at nearly 12 billion CFA francs, Gabon, the 7th oil producing country in Africa, is struggling. According to the managing director of the Petroleum Products Storage Company (SGEPP), the only refinery in the country no longer has sufficient technical capacity to cover the local market today. Hence the recourse to importing 50% of refined products. It is this refueling circuit that often takes time.
“Part of the volumes that are sold are also imported, because the Société gabonaise de raffinage is unable to meet the needs of the national market”, declared Andy Makindey Nzé Nguema, managing director of SGEPP, specifying that all stakeholders in the fuel distribution chain in Gabon are currently working to avoid stockouts. According to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Gabon’s production averaged 188,000 barrels per day in 2021.
