Queuing for fuel shows systemic failure
Opinion
By
Mutahi Mureithi
| Apr 12, 2026
Last week, and for the first time in a very long time, I queued for petrol somewhere in Karatina. I found a tier one petrol station that somehow had some fuel that was being rationed like the rare commodity it has become.
The maximum one could fuel was Ksh2,000. The petrol attendant had made a Solomon-like decision to ration the fuel, and he would stick to it come what may.
I started at about number five on the queue, but after one hour, the chaos that reigned at that station was something to behold: I simply gave up and went back to shags. The usual poverty mentality and hoarding DNA kicked in.
Boda bodas called each other from the entire county of Nyeri and took control of the station with jerricans and plastic containers, even though there is a law against selling the commodity in such containers. The petrol station owners had to yield to these rascals as they promised to burn down the station if they were not served first. It was a fiasco.
This is the ground-level face of a crisis: the frantic hoarding, the disregard for order, and the survival-of-the-fittest scramble that kicks in when basic resources vanish. But as frustrating as the boda boda blockade was, it was merely a symptom of a much more systemic rot.
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The bigger scandal was not with these rapscallions riding on two wheels, commandeering the fuel station. The scandal, as was to later come out in media reports, was that somebody somewhere had seen it fit to import sub-standard fuel, mixed it up with good fuel, and sold it to us at a premium.
Apparently, they forgot that there existed what is referred to as a G to G agreement that has mercifully kept prices and forex stable. And of course, these people were not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts: there was the little matter of a couple of billions that they would pocket.
I always ask myself: what is it with us, that we are always looking for ways to enrich ourselves at whatever expense?
How many meals can you have with 500 million shillings? How many cars can you drive? How many beds can you lie on? How do you even carry 500 million shillings by the way?
A million shillings weighs a kilogramme. It means that Ksh500 million weighs half a tonne. You need a pick-up to ferry that money and a few musclemen to ferry it inside your house and hide it under the bed.
Anyway, enough of the logistics of handling 500 million shillings. Let’s focus on the thieves, the economic saboteurs par excellence. These people deserve a painful punishment that fits the crime.
It’s not just enough to tell them to return the money. No. They should be sentenced to long terms in a maximum prison. If it were in the olden days, we would have tarred, feathered, and thereafter quartered them. In China, they would have, as some friends like putting it, been weighed at the end of a short rope.
The larger failure lies in the judicial system: Those fellows will go scot free in a couple of years after people have forgotten the ruinous nature of their evil deeds. In our current climate, the judicial system often feels like a revolving door for the wealthy. We have become accustomed to the cycle: nobody of means ever gets sentenced to a jail term.
If we are to move past the "Karatina queues" and the fuel fiascos, the punishment must fit the crime. We cannot afford a system where the weight of the stolen money is lighter than the weight of the law. Until the cost of corruption outweighs the half-tonne of gold at the end of the rainbow, the rapscallions, both on two wheels and in high-end suits, will continue to commandeer our future.
It is time we stop admiring the "hustle" of the thief and start demanding the integrity of the state. Because at the end of the day, you can't drive a car on adulterated fuel, no matter how much money you have hidden under your bed.