A gravel truck transporting building supplies to a construction site suffered total brake failure on a hill above the bus station.
The crash caused gallons of petrol to spill from the damaged buses which were in the process of being refuelled, flooding the wreckage and parts of the crowded bus station.
The bus station was in the Nyanya district of the city, which is a very poor and dangerous suburb, and thus it was sometime before emergency fire-fighter services arrived and combatted the blaze, which was mostly being fought by local people as best they could.
The full death toll cannot be known, as there is little available census information for the area, some bodies were destroyed outright in the blaze, and others may have been removed by relatives before the recovery operation began.
The country was extremely poverty stricken, with huge shanty towns filled with rebellious groups, free to express some of their resentment at the government following the fall of the thirty-year military dictatorship in 1999.