The desperation caused by Zimbabwe’s fuel shortages was illustrated Saturday when a Harare mortician and his assistant lent an infant corpse to a black market fuel dealer so he could claim cheap diesel reserved for the bereaved burying their dead.
Police spokesperson Inspector Cecilia Churu confirmed that Knocks Zvakwidza and his assistant, named only as Chikwanha, both of whom worked in the mortuary of a state hospital at Chitungwiza township just south of Harare, had been arrested on Thursday for ”violating a dead body” and for corruptly issuing burial orders.
An unnamed illegal fuel dealer was also in custody, she said.
The scarcity of fuel is so serious now it can be obtained at ordinary service stations almost only with special permits, including burial orders carried by undertakers or grieving relatives.
Having a coffin with a body inside ensures prompt attention at the pumps without having to wait in a queue, the state-controlled daily Herald said in a report on Saturday on the incident.
The newspaper said Chikwanha issued a burial order for a month-old child to the fuel dealer on Thursday, and also gave him the use of the corpse in a tiny coffin. The dealer drove to the nearest service station where the production of the burial order and the dead baby got him instant attention.
He drove back to the Chitungwiza mortuary to return the coffin and its contents, but was stopped at the hospital gates by security guards whose suspicions were aroused when they saw that the same coffin which was taken away earlier for supposed burial was now re-entering the hospital.
”Investigations that we have carried out so far indicate that senior hospital officials were called and the man was quizzed, and he revealed that he was working in cahoots with the mortician and his assistant,” the Herald quoted Inspector Churu.
The newspaper said Zvakwidza had been suspended from the same job two years ago for allegedly extorting money from poor people who came to collect the bodies of relatives who’d died in hospital but who could not afford to pay the dead person’s hospital fees.
Kvakwidza would only release the body after the grieving relatives had paid him a bribe, said the paper.
Economic collapse in the last three years of President Robert Mugabe’s rule has dried up fuel imports, to the point where the country’s vehicle fleet is kept going by the illegal black market, which carries a high risk of buying fuel contaminated with water.
Executives of multinational oil companies, which own most of the country’s service stations, say they have not had deliveries for well over a month from the state-run fuel procurement company.
So valuable is the black market — most of it said to be run by cronies of Mugabe — that most bus operators park their vehicles outside service stations which get special allocations of fuel meant to keep commuter transport services running.
However, police say, the bus operators immediately drain their tanks once they get fuel and sell it on the black market for about 2 000 Zimbabwe dollars (75 US cents), four times the official controlled price. – Sapa-DPA