AMMAN (Middle East Eye) – Abu Taleb sits idly in his small empty shop in the Abu Nser neighborhood of Jordan’s capital, Amman, counting the hours since the last client looking to repair a kerosene heater showed up at his door.
“No one comes to fix their stoves anymore in preparation for winter. The price of kerosene has become too high,” Abu Taleb told Middle East Eye.
The drop in business witnessed around Jordan is due to the Jordanian government’s decision last month to raise the price of kerosene, a fuel used by poor people to heat their homes, to $1.21 per liter, up from 50 cents last year.
“Instead of kerosene, our customers are now looking for firewood heaters, for which they can use a variety of data-x-items to burn, including wood, paper and even books,” Abu Taleb said.
Until recently, successive Jordanian governments had kept the price of kerosene widely unchanged as winter approached, by lowering or cancelling taxes on the fuel, as a way of helping poor Jordanians.
The support, however, has not materialized under the current government of Bisher Khasawaneh, which started imposing taxes on all types energy products, including those needed by people for daily consumption, in 2019.
The tax increase has further weakened the purchasing power of Jordanians already struggling with post-Covid 19 inflation and the impact of the war in Ukraine, both of which have affected the local economy and sent prices soaring across the board.
“I’m in trouble,” said Issa Ahabreh, a taxi driver who already works 14-hour days to barely save $17 per day.
For Ahabreh, these long hours will no longer be enough to make an adequate living for his family amid the general rise in fuel prices.
“Do they not feel with the poor in winter months? We, the poor people, use kerosene for heating while the prime minister and other officials have underfloor heating,” Ahabreh told MEE.
“I will have to burn wood and books this winter because I cannot afford to buy kerosene. Also, the electricity costs are beyond my means.”
Since the beginning of the year, the government has raised the price of diesel six times and five times for petrol, although it brought down the cost of the latter twice in the past two months.
The crisis is being felt across Jordan. The first signs of the crisis appeared in 2017, when the government began gradually removing all subsidies on fuel in order to save $600mn. The move was followed by a regular increase in taxes as part of the conditions imposed by the International Monetary Fund with the aim of ending subsidies.