The Minister Of Energy and Power Development Joram Gumbo dismissed reports that top government officials and civil servants are not affected by the current fuel shortages.
There are reports that most of the bigwigs move around driving high fuel-consuming vehicles, SUVs and Mercs in the midst of the fuel crisis. The top officials reportedly get fuel from the Central Mechanical Equipment Department (CMED) where there are absolutely no fuel queues.
Minister Gumbo, however, said that is not so. Said Gumbo
I have heard all those allegations but they are not true. They wait in queues just like everyone else.
They buy coupons and CMED simply reserves fuel to coupon holders and the rest goes to buyers. Every service station gets allocations from Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe equally and according to the number of outlets. So, there is no favouritism to CMED.
… I said we have enough fuel, and we do have fuel in bond storage tanks in Msasa and Mabvuku but the only problem is foreign currency shortages and each service station gets an allocation according to outlets and it’s just that CMED is all over the country.