Fuel prices hit chaotic West African travel

By Ingrid Melander

DAKAR (Reuters) - Chaotic transport is a part of life in West Africa, but getting to work has become even harder as rocketing fuel prices ignite protests by bus and taxi drivers, squeeze family budgets and encourage fuel smuggling.

Global oil prices doubled in the past year and continued to rise strongly in 2008, hitting hard those who earn a living on the roads of some of the world's poorest countries.

This has fuelled social unrest in some fragile countries whose governments do not have the means to indefinitely soak up the higher fuel prices with subsidies.

Battered taxis and colorful minibuses with smashed lights and cracked windscreens are a common sight in West Africa, where most people rely on them to get around. But their drivers say soaring fuel prices have swallowed all their profits.

"We work only to pay for the fuel, we are not making money," Moussa, who has been a taxi driver in Senegal's capital Dakar for seven years, said as he stopped to fill his tank.

The price of diesel here has risen by a quarter since the start of the year to 813 CFA francs ($1.92) per liter, but taxi drivers find it hard to pass on the higher costs.

"We ask for more, but clients cannot give us more because they have no money," said Moussa, who declined to give his last name.

High fuel prices have triggered some strikes already and prompted threats of more.

Birame Faye, a young minibus driver in Dakar, said drivers' meager revenues had fallen by more than a third.

Minibus drivers have to pay for the fuel out of the day's earnings, he said, while government-fixed fares have remained steady for the passengers who cram inside in the summer heat.

"We want the government to increase the fares so that we can feed ourselves," Faye said, adding that drivers might go on strike if that did not happen.

Many West African governments have tried to cushion the effects of price hikes on consumers by reducing taxes and levies on food imports and bolstering subsidies for essential items, like rice and fuel.

But subsidies weigh heavily on governments' budgets and some countries, like Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso, have now moved to increase fuel prices to reflect, at least partly, higher oil prices. That has, in turn, sparked more protests.

STRIKES

Ivory Coast's economic capital Abidjan was paralyzed by a transport strike in July after the government decided to raise gasoline and diesel prices by 29 and 44 percent respectively.