On the sidelines of the “TICAD 8” Summit (Tokyo International Conference on African Development), on August 27 and 28, 2022, Avenue Habib Bourguiba, Place January 14, Avenue Mohammed V and the Japanese Garden have been refurbished, adorned with luminous signs by the municipality of the city of Tunis. But a stone’s throw from downtown Tunis, a completely different reality is taking shape, made up of queues and unprecedented shortages that set in over time.
For several hundred meters, giant queues have blocked vehicle traffic near gas stations for the past 48 hours. Shortage requires fuel is rationed up to 50 dinars per customer. Tempers flare following the incivility of those who try to burn politeness to grab a few places, while some pay a bribe to fill up. After an hour of waiting, it is not uncommon for people to turn around when the station’s reserves are exhausted.
Sugar, semolina, flour, rice, vegetable oil, bottled water, soft drinks, juices, butter, and now coffee. This is the long list of products concerned in supermarkets by notices of the type: “We inform our customers that several products are in short supply due to shortages. We must therefore limit sales per customer to one or two products among those on the list”. In supermarkets, the most attentive notice that certain products such as sodas, particularly popular in summer, are concealed to attract favoritism: local residents and inhabitants of the district first.
Worse, the manager of a supermarket chain told us that he had heard of the risk of the imminent closure of certain factories directly dependent on the supply of sugar. Today August 26, his fears are confirmed: dozens of employees of the soft drink and biscuit factories, laid off on technical unemployment following the stoppage of production, are demonstrating in front of the headquarters of the governorate of Ben Arous.
If the international inflationary context, impacted by the Russian-Ukrainian war, has a lot to do with it, the authorities, including the Tunisian Ministry of Commerce, are singled out for their inaction and their lack of communication around this crisis, when those in charge do not are not just in denial about the state of strategic stocks.
For the umpteenth time, the Presidency of the Republic is bent on what seems to be a scapegoat or a symptom: when receiving Prime Minister Nejla Bouden on Thursday, President Saïed called on her once again to “punish speculators who according to him “improvise crises so as to enrich themselves illegally“. Vigilance NGOs explain for their part that the recent amendment of the Tunisian penal code was counterproductive. By now punishing speculation in some cases with sentences of several decades in prison, the new law has resulted in a fear of cold storage in particular, which has contributed to creating certain shortages via a domino effect.
The messianic blooper
The same day, a press release from the Palace of Carthage gave us an astonishing text, glorifying the presidential instructions promulgated “according to the Tunisian approach aimed at getting the African continent, Humanity, and the whole world out of the current situation“, excuse a bit. The web laughs about it, invoking the similarities of this type of bluster with the late Colonel Gaddafi, former king of kings of Africa and savior of humanity. He too was full of superlatives about his own unusual aspiration to “reach the highest peaks in history”. The opposition proposes for his part to the president to content himself trivially with finding solutions for Tunisia, before going to the bedside of Humanity.
“Tunisia aims to create its own space agency,” announced the Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, Moncef Boukthir, yesterday. While waiting to conquer space, here is something to console oneself for the daily shortages here below.
