Fresh reports reaching the desk of Africa Today News, New York has revealed that most of the filling stations all across France have been reportedly down on petrol on Monday as a massive strike by some of the workers at energy giant TotalEnergies had also entered its third week despite serious pressure by the government to negotiate.
And according to some of the official estimates, around 30 percent of some of the service stations were out of all or at least some fuel types which has also been causing long queues for increasingly desperate motorists.
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There had recently been some hopes that the pay-related strike action which had been held at TotalEnergies, among the world’s biggest energy multinationals, would end rapidly after their management had on Sunday agreed to bring forward salary talks in return for workers resuming service.
But the hard-left CGT union declined the offer, accusing management of “blackmail”.
The union is demanding a wage rise of 10 percent for 2022, pointing to TotalEnergies’ exceptionally high first-quarter profit of $10.6 billion.
The boss of TotalEnergies’ European refineries, Jean-Marc Durand, countered that “it’s the French people who are being blackmailed”.
The petrol crisis is also coming at a time of high energy prices and inflation that are sapping French households’ purchasing power.
In another report, No fewer than seven people were killed and about 16 others badly burnt after a tanker truck exploded in a village in the western Democratic Republic of Congo, a provincial chief has confirmed.
Africa Today News, New York reports that the blast had occurred overnight in the village of Mbuba which was about 120 kilometres (75 miles) west of the capital Kinshasa, Kongo Central provincial governor Guy Bandu tweeted.
Mbuba lies on the busy RN1 highway linking Kinshasa to the ports of Matadi and Boma.
No fewer than 50 people were reportedly killed in a fuel-tanker blast in the same village sometime in October 2018.
‘It is high time to take bold and drastic measures to strengthen transport regulations, especially for flammable products, to end to this cycle of accidents,’ the provincial governor tweeted.
Later in the day, Bandu gave the toll of seven dead and 16 badly burned in the latest blast, stressing that the figures were provisional.