Despite democracy, Tunisia's revolution remains unfinished
The town, which helped trigger a wave of revolts across the Arab world, now has a swimming pool, a plush new cafe where young men and women mingle, enjoying the complementary wifi, and freedom of speech.
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But Rhimi, 25, is unimpressed. “There are no jobs in Sidi Bouzid,” she said.
It was unemployment, along with alleged police harassment, that prompted street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi to set himself alight outside a nearby government building on December 17, 2010.
The act proved a tipping point for Tunisia’s long-marginalised interior.
Within weeks, vast demonstrations had spread to the capital and swept long-time dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from power, setting off a domino-like string of revolts across the Middle East and North Africa.
Tunisia has been praised for its democratic transition with its first free and fair parliamentary elections in 2011 and presidential poll in 2014.
But many in Sidi Bouzid say life in the past decade has become worse.
“Lots of people we know have tried to get to Europe,” said Rhimi.
“Some have died at sea. Other people have set themselves on fire. Some people can’t afford to eat.”
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Rhimi completed a professional diploma in computer science in 2015.
But in a region where some jobs — in factories, clothes shops or agriculture, for example — pay just 150 dinars (46 euros) a month, it took her four years to save start-up funds for a small restaurant.
When she approached banks and micro-credit lenders for more, she was rejected.
“There are so many conditions. They make it really difficult to get a loan,” she said.
“I started my project, but after six months I closed it down. I’ve been unemployed ever since,” added Rhimi, currently an unpaid volunteer with civil society groups who continues to apply for public sector jobs.
- Investors flee -
Her story is a far cry from Rachid Fetini’s early career.
In 1990, two decades before the revolution, he returned from studying in France and established his first textile factory.
“I had no experience in the world of business,” he said. “But in one month I managed to set up a factory with 50 workers. After a year and a half, I had 300 staff.”
By the eve of the uprising, Fetini was a major employer with 500 staff.
But “after the revolution, bit by bit, all my clients fled Sidi Bouzid,” he said. “They were afraid.”
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Fetini bemoaned media coverage of the region as being perennially on strike, “which is not true at all.”
But he also blamed the lack of laws and government strategies to boost investment, as well as Tunisia’s clunky, politicised bureaucracy.
“There’s a fratricidal struggle between political parties, which means that even local officials can’t take decisions,” he said.
“Nobody dares sign a document without having political cover… just in case.”
The coronavirus pandemic dealt another crushing blow to his business.
Today, his factory near the town centre sits empty, rows of sewing machines idle in the dusty light.
Across town in an industrial zone, Fetini walks among the dark concrete columns of an abandoned building site, set to be a pharmaceuticals factory.
Like Rhimi’s restaurant, the project was suspended because the banks would not lend to the owner, an associate of Fetini.
“Their demands and the guarantees they ask for are endless,” Fetini said.
Many investments “are blocked… for lack of finance, or because of certain lobbies who don’t want such-and-such a factory to be created.”
- State projects blocked -
A huge, empty plot of land on the fertile plain outside Sidi Bouzid vividly illustrates the problem.
Surrounded by prickly pears and olive groves, this is the site of Somaproc, a processing hub to help the region’s struggling farmers tackle a key barrier — access to markets.
It will include vegetable and livestock markets, an abattoir and a research facility, strategically located near major roads to other Tunisian towns, ports and coastal cities including the capital.
Set to employ 1,200 people and benefit some 130,000, the state-backed project has secured millions of euros in foreign funding and the support of Tunisian President Qais Saied.
But eight years since it was conceived, nothing has been built.
Director Lotfi Hamdi listed legal and administrative obstacles and described a complex web of government bodies involved.
“The project was designed in 2012,” he said. “Sadly, there have been a lot of delays.”
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- ‘Deep crisis’ -
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought even more economic misery to Tunisia.
Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi, the country’s ninth head of government since the revolution, announced in early November a record budget deficit of 14 percent of GDP.
“Our country has never experienced such a deep crisis,” he said.
Unemployment in the country was just over 15 percent in May, the most recent figure available, according to the INS national statistics office.
But despite the economic setbacks and other difficulties they have faced, some in Sidi Bouzid still praise the uprising’s achievements.
“The revolution was more than necessary, and well overdue,” said Hayet Amami, the regional head of an association for unemployed graduates.
Today, “you’re free to do activism, in political parties, in society and in unions.”
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Since 2011, many young Tunisians have been elected to both local and national authorities, in part thanks to a post-revolution quota system.
And despite the hardships, there are visible changes in Sidi Bouzid — including the cafe where Rhimi sat with her friends.
Roads have been fixed and government buildings refurbished.
But for Rhimi’s friend Hanin Kadri, also an activist, those changes mean little when jobs are scarce and state institutions riddled with corruption.
“Sure, they did up the municipality building and the governorate,” she said.
“But that’s not what we had a revolution for.”
Rhimi is more emphatic.
“As far as I’m concerned, the revolution didn’t bring me anything,” she said.
Tunisians may have overthrown dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali a decade ago but, with few reforms to the country’s security forces and an economy rife with nepotism, its revolution is far from achieving its goals.
Ben Ali fled the country on January 14, 2011, with only a few members of his family and his closest aides leaving with him.
The police, the backbone of his rule, stayed largely intact.
Oula Ben Nejma, who led investigations for Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission (IVD), said only 54 interior ministry staff had been sacked in 2011, along with a handful of others two years later.
“They were neither put on trial nor punished,” she said.
“Others have seen their careers continue to develop, including people under investigation… for crimes committed under Ben Ali.”
Following the revolution, some officers were handed heavy sentences for torture, and the state security agency, notorious for torture in the interior ministry’s jails, was dissolved.
Tunisia’s 2014 constitution redefined the role of the police in a democracy, and for a time, NGOs were allowed to make unannounced visits to Tunisian prisoners.
But after this brief opening, “the demons of the past came back,” said Sihem Benseddrine, the former head of the IVD.
The body was set up after the revolt to investigate rights violations under both Ben Ali and Tunisia’s first post-independence president Habib Bourguiba, as well as to hold perpetrators to account and rehabilitate their victims.
But police unions formed since have applied political pressure to protect their own, sometimes raiding the offices of judges investigating alleged abuses.
‘Kamikaze political courage’ -
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Special courts were launched in 2018 to judge 1,400 people on accusations of murder, rape and torture.
But police have hobbled the process, while almost all the officers summonsed have refused to appear.
The IVD, whose mandate ended in 2018, recommended creating an independent police watchdog and an intelligence service answerable to parliament.
Neither have been created.
While torture is no longer practised systematically, since 2013, the World Organisation Against Torture has documented 500 victims and says those responsible enjoy “almost total impunity”.
A string of deadly jihadist attacks in 2015 put a brake on efforts to strengthen the rights of suspects, with security services again given wide-ranging surveillance powers, and a state of emergency that has stayed in place since.
And rather than improving police training or work conditions, political leaders have repeatedly tried to pass a law bolstering officers’ impunity when they use force — although they have backed down after a public outcry.
Still, “it would take almost kamikaze political courage” to fully reform the police and justice systems, said analyst Selim Kharrat, citing their deep political connections.
- Holding back change -
The judiciary was heavily politicised under Ben Ali.
Today, the most publicly visible magistrates from his era have mostly been sacked — but nothing has been done to hold corrupt judges to account.
In its final report last year, the IVD called for measures to strengthen the independence of magistrates and administrative courts, a subject that featured heavily in the 2019 presidential election.
One of the front-runners in the vote, media mogul Nabil Karoui, was imprisoned for much of the campaign on charges of money laundering and tax evasion dating back several years.
The timing of his arrest stoked accusations of misuse of the justice system.
Tunisia has won plaudits for its democratic transition, its free elections and new liberal constitution, contrasting sharply with the civil wars and ever-more-repressive dictatorships that have taken hold in other countries hit by Arab Spring uprisings.
But reform of Tunisia’s economy and the reduction of gaping inequalities remain a big issue.
“We have made civil and political rights a priority, but we have neglected economic and environmental rights,” said Kharrat.
There has been growing public debate on “crony capitalism”, the system “in which family conglomerates retain control over one of the main inhibitors to change”, he said.
- Big players favoured -
Ben Ali’s rule had adopted and expanded a system dating back to colonial times, granting certain families a free pass to operate in certain domains while other, less well-connected families were excluded — to the detriment of the country’s development.
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Under the system, “the state can require trucking companies to have either a single truck or more than 18, ensuring that big players who were already established shared the market without competition,” said Louai Chebbi, head of Alerte, an NGO which campaigns against the problem.
Each make of car can only be imported by a single agent, giving lucrative monopolies to groups such as Ennakl, formerly owned by one of Ben Ali’s sons-in-law but bought in 2013 by another well-established family.
Overlapping ownership of banks by family-owned conglomerates and the state make access to credit extremely difficult for players who do not already belong to the existing networks.
For example, start-ups working to launch mobile phone payment systems failed for lack of the required five million dinars (1.5 million euros), a far higher requirement than in other countries.
Once again, this played to the interests of established actors such as the banks or telecoms operators belonging to the state or to established families, Chebbi said.
He added that such arrangements affect businesses of all sizes, perpetuating nepotism that excludes whole swathes of society from various business sectors.
And in a sign that Ben Ali’s departure did not bring an end to bad habits, Tunisians say corruption has grown.
Between 2010 and 2017, the country fell 15 places in Transparency International’s global index of perceived graft.
This phenomenon and the resulting economic stagnation — exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic — has fanned nostalgia for the old regime, which carefully portrayed itself as an economic success.
Radhouane Erguez, a consultant at think tank Joussour, warns that such nostalgia could even endanger Tunisia’s democratic transition.
“It could bring into question everything we have achieved on the political level,” he said.
