Despite its difficulties to balance its current budget and financing the 2023 financial year, the government of Najla Bouden seems determined to carry out a very ambitious plan at 11 billion euros intended for the building and public works sector (BTP).
Despite a state budget in crisis, saved in extremis by the promise of a loan from the International Monetary Fund next December, the Tunisian Ministry of Equipment sees things on a grand scale. According to Africa intelligence, the executive, encouraged by the national federation of building and public works contractors, plans to invest no less than 35 billion Tunisian dinars (nearly 11 billion euros) until 2035, particularly in the country’s road infrastructure.
For the opposition, the Bouden government considered both an interim and short-lived government pending the legislative elections at the end of 2022, responsible for the management of current affairs, does not have the legitimacy required to commit the country to titanic projects on a period well in excess of a decade.
Thus the current power is in the process of investing in its infrastructures to the tune of the equivalent of 80% of its 2021 GDP: several large-scale projects had been presented in this respect by the Ministry of Equipment from October 5. That of the Bizerte bridge would be the most advanced, the 4 companies selected have less than 4 months to submit their proposals. The overall project, which also involves the construction of roads on either side of the 2-kilometer viaduct, is alone estimated at 277 million euros. Almost the entire amount will nevertheless be covered by financing from the European Investment Bank (EIB), which granted 123 million euros in 2016, and from the African Development Bank (AfDB), up to 122 million euros.
Another project, the giant bridge linking the island of Djerba to the mainland will be carried out in public-private partnership (PPP), so as to reduce the share of the Tunisian State in the overall cost, estimated at 700 million dinars (nearly 218 million euros). Regarding the feasibility study, entrusted in July 2021 to SCET Tunisia, is still in progress. Also planned as a PPP, the construction of the A3 Bou Salem – Algerian border motorway, for which the technical studies are being finalized, would cost 400 million dinars (124 million euros). Finally, the construction project for a third ring road in Greater Tunis, called X30, is also progressing slowly. The technical studies have been carried out,
Saïed imposes heavy fines on banks
On another front indirectly linked to State finances, the President of the Republic Kaïs Saïed has just decreed a new presidential decree-law published in the latest issue of the Official Journal of the Republic of Tunisia (JORT), a text which imposes fines ranging from 30 to 100 thousand dinars to “banks and financial institutions granting their customers loans at an excessive interest rate”.
This presidential decree n° 2022-67 dated October 19, 2022, thus concerns any financing granted at an overall effective profit rate that exceeds, at the time it is granted, the average effective profit rate practiced during the previous half-year by the banks. and financial institutions approved to carry out Islamic banking operations, by a margin which is also fixed by decree according to the categories of financing and beneficiaries.
If it is based on an idea of justice, some economists consider this to be a dangerous precedent for executive interference in the banking sector and its borrowing products. Especially since under Kais Saïed, the state in financial difficulty recently borrowed an amount of 1.9 billion Tunisian dinars from Tunisian national banks, just last September. Carthage’s gesture could therefore be interpreted as an open war declared against the banks.
The day before yesterday, October 24, the head of government Najla Bouden, who presented a national program of economic reforms, was once again mocked on social networks for the laborious reading of her own inaugural speech, delivered in calamitous literary Arabic.
