Cheating at petrol stations

I was at an Oando filling station along Idimu-Ikotun Road at about 5 pm on Sunday, 8 January to fill my tank. The indicator was already showing that I was very low on fuel but the red indicator was not yet on. I asked the attendant to fill my tank at the end of which the metre showed that 53 litres had been put into the car, a 1997 Nissan Primera.Now, the tank has a capacity of 50 litres and at the time I arrived at the filling station, there must still have been 5 litres in the tank. It's when the fuel is below 5 litres that the critical low fuel indicator lights up. How can 53 litres go into a container that can hold only 50 litres' And the container was not totally empty when I drove into the petrol station.The attendant had no sensible explanation for the strange event other than to advise that I should calibrate my tank. You can only laugh at the excuse. The pump had definitely been tampered with. This is a clear case of systematic fraud, which must be costing unsuspecting consumers of billions of naira annually. And most people won't notice the fraud because they don't usually fill their tanks.I narrate another example of corporate fleece of the Nigerian consumers. I loaded N1,200 naira on my MTN card so that I could spend N500 naira of it to buy the 24-hour internet bundle on 8 January. I clicked on the MTN Fastlink icon and clicked on connect and sought to buy the 24-hour bundle, which costs N500 naira only to receive a text message from MTN that I didn't have enough credit on my SIM to carry out the purchase.I removed the SIM from the surf stick and checked my balance with my phone only to discover that I had nothing left. Because I wanted to send an urgent email, I rushed out to buy N400 and N100 naira cards, which I loaded again and followed the same procedure. Again, the N500 naira got lost. I called a friend to narrate my ordeal to him and he explained that I shouldn't have clicked on 'Connect' before buying the bundles. And because I did just that, was the reason why I lost N1,700 naira. What a flimsy excuse to cheat consumers' The question I would like to pose to MTN is: can you do that in South Africa' These acts of cheating further impoverish Nigerians and make life more difficult for them. The regulatory bodies and especially consumers must rise to defend the value of the money they spend. And that is exactly the reason why we need effective consumer rights groups to carry out independent checks on the integrity of consumer transactions.I hope that after the battle for the reversal of subsidy withdrawal had been won, consumers would rise again to fight cheating at the petrol stations. Akeem Adekola AdebayoIsheri-Olofin,Alimosho,Lagos State
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