By attacking the government on its economic and social management, the president of the General Confederation of Algerian Enterprises (CGEA), considered close to power, hoped to make things happen. But her initiative seems to have backfired.
For Saida Neghza, the troubles began on September 7, when the open letter she had addressed to the Algerian president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, was made public. This message, the one that the government daily El Moudjahid still presented at the beginning of the summer as the incarnation of “entrepreneurship and the promoter of the option of opening up Algeria, as instructed by the president of the Republic”, points to a “generalized slump” and “various persecutions and pressures from different representatives of the State”.
A clear break in tone from the president of the General Confederation of Algerian Entrepreneurs (CGEA) who, in August, participated in the national conference around the political initiative aimed at building a “common front against external threats” launched by the president of the Islamist movement El Bina, Abdelkader Bengrina. An initiative whose objective, accuses the opposition, would above all be to mark the ground for a second term of Abdelmadjid Tebboune.
In May 2021, the woman who had modestly invested in the business world in 1990 with a coffee roasting company was even received with great fanfare as president. Officially to submitted a detailed report on certain disadvantaged regions that she had visited as part of her national tour.
A way for the president, confides a source close to power, to return the favor to Saida Neghza, who, four years earlier, had refused to support the cabal orchestrated against him by the former businessman and former boss of the Forum of Business Leaders (FCE) Ali Haddad, and which ended up costing him his post as Prime Minister three months after his appointment.
According to those around her, Saida Neghza hoped, with this proximity to the president, to raise her confederation to the rank of the leading employers’ organization in Algeria. This is also what motivated the diatribe that she launched, in April 2022, against the Prime Minister, Aymen Benabderrahmane.
The latter having chosen, as part of consultations with the country’s employers’ organizations regarding economic recovery, to first receive Kamel Moula, president of the Algerian Economic Renewal Council (CREA), the boss of the CGEA had accused him of dialogue with an organization that she described as the “reincarnation of the FCE”, thus suggesting that the Prime Minister was perpetuating the practices in force at the time of Ali Haddad and his friends, under the Bouteflika era.
Video on social networks
Since then, Saida Neghza has worked to strengthen its stature on the African continent and in the Arab world. With success. She was notably crowned, in September 2022, in Geneva, under the patronage of the UN, president of the club of the best business women in Africa, Then, in February 2023, she was classified by Forbes Africa among the fifty most successful women. most influential on the continent. But she does not get to meet President Tebboune again.
It is this lack of meeting which, it is believed, convinced her to send the open letter of September 7 to the head of state. The letter was supported, the next day, by a video posted online on social networks. The head of the employers’ organization mentions fines imposed on certain businessmen which sometimes exceed the amount of their company’s assets, without them being allowed access to their files to defend themselves. She therefore claims the right to an appeal and suggests transforming these fines into the obligation to launch new productive investment projects.
Still, in her video, she also addresses the delicate issue of acquiring real estate abroad. A case that earned heavy prison sentences for former senior officials and businessmen of the Bouteflika regime. “We must take into account the particularities of the country, including the non-convertibility of the dinars and the square [black currency market, Editor’s note]… Every businessman who has made a profit aspires to own property abroad, but Algerian law does not allow it,” argues Saida Neghza.
Also calling for the creation of a commission responsible for carrying out investigations into “the issuance of import licenses and quotas from which some benefit and not others”, which has led, according to her, to “high prices and scarcity products”, Saida Neghza expected to obtain arbitration from President Tebboune. The reaction expressed three days later in an article from the official Algérie Presse Service (APS) agency, was not what was hoped for.
“The megaphone of the old order”
In the text published by APS, the president of the CGEA is first criticized for massively disseminating her open letter on social networks, thus flouting “the practices of correspondence addressed to the Presidency of the Republic”.
The agency also accuses Saida Neghza of being “the spokesperson for interests that she is supposedly supposed to fight, those of the old order, those of an issaba whose favorite sport was not the practice of golf but misappropriate the people’s money. The text also evokes “pressures reminiscent of the old days, when pressure groups, lobbies, and oligarchs – such as predatory organizations like the ex-FCE whose existence was exterminated and this thanks first in Hirak, and then thanks to the 2019 presidential election – exercised their blackmail on the State.”
As for the request, formulated by Saida Neghza, to revive the “tripartite”, these meetings between government, unions, and employers thinks would constitute “the appropriate framework to study the economic situation of the country, remove the constraints and make proposals, through a frank and broad socio-economic dialogue, for inclusive and vigorous economic growth”, it also backfired. “It is the tripartite, insists the official agency, which distributed the money from the printing press to the FCE and which cost billions of dollars to the Public Treasury. » As for the remarks of the employer manager on the causes of the increase in prices of basic products, APS considers that they constitute “an example of its ignorance of economic realities”.
Monday, September 11, Saida Neghza responded to these attacks on her Facebook account, explaining that her approach was motivated “by the preservation of the country’s best interests and its stability, and not by the ambition to derive personal dividends.” “. While once again requesting the intervention of the Head of State to put an end to the practices she denounces.
