By Patrick Markey and Tarek Amara
FOR years, trains ferried millions of dollars in phosphate past Nouredine Ezzidine’s Tunisian town, where young men like him idle their days in cafes over cigarettes and coffee, desperate for work.
After seven years with no job, the mechanics graduate had had enough. He joined protesters who saw one option to make demands on the government: No jobs for us, no phosphate for you.
With a tree trunk and a make-shift tent, Ezzidine’s group blocked the small-gauge railway from Redayef mine. Ten months later, the blockade is still in place and mountains of washed, sandy, phosphate rock -- used in fertilizers and industry — are now piled up waiting for export.
Tunisia was the sole political success story of the “Arab Spring” protest movement that swept the Arab world in 2011: the one country where a long-serving leader was toppled without triggering violence or civil war.
But six years after the uprising swept Zine El Abidine Ben Ali into exile, Tunisia’s much-praised model of democratic transition is souring for many like Ezzidine.
The phosphate industry provides money for the government but few local jobs. Blockades like the one in Redayef have interfered with the trade, one of many protests across the country illustrating the depth of frustration.
“There are no opportunities here, just phosphate,” Ezzidine said, outside the locked gate of the Redayef loading bay that usually ships 20 percent of Tunisia’s phosphate exports. “Riches from here pay for projects everywhere, but what about jobs for us here?”
In Tunis, protesters have camped for months outside one ministry to demand work. Elsewhere they have threatened to commit suicide in front of local government offices. Unions have been warning of strikes over job freezes.
A sit-in interrupted gas exports this year by Petrofac, a British company that threatened to pull out of the country if it could not operate, until the state ended the protests in September with a promise of more jobs.
Prime Minister Youssef Chahed is under pressure from international lenders to deliver more reforms and spending cuts, a package softened by credits for jobless youth, rural development and hiring in the phosphate industry.
But past governments failed to find a formula to fully control the deficit while managing the fragile social peace. Attempts to push through much-needed fiscal reforms often ended in political inertia and mixed results.
The budget deficit will creep up from 5 percent in 2015 to 6.5 percent this year, mostly due to public wages. Officials see new bank and investment laws helping growth, but a past attempt to push through higher vehicle taxes met with riots.
For Western partners, Tunisia remains a beacon in a region rife with conflict. Since 2011, billions of dollars in credits and loans helped shore up Tunisia’s economy.
Approving a $2.9 billion loan in September, the IMF praised Tunisia for streamlining bureaucracy and promoting the private sector, but said attempts to tackle public wages and control spending were falling behind.
It’s a delicate time. Foreign debt payments of $3 billion loom next year, the public hiring freeze is meeting union resistance and new taxes are testing the patience of Tunisians who already say the government has done too little too late.
In the marginalized south — heartland of the protests in 2011 — many dismiss Chahed’s Cabinet in the north as out of touch, a remnant of former Ben Ali regime elites spouting promises they cannot deliver.
Riots broke out in the south in January and April this year. “After the revolution, we thought the social and economic (issues) would be central,” said Abedramane Hdili, at the FTDES rights group that monitors protests. “We have a class of disenfranchised people with no opportunity. Tunisia may pay a heavy price.”
Backseat economics
Economic reforms took a backseat during a period of political compromise in the early days after the revolution, when squabbling between secularists and Islamists over the direction of the country threatened to scuttle Tunisia’s democratic experiment.
Then came the attacks: Daesh (the so-called IS) group targeted tourism, gunning down foreigners at a Tunis museum and carrying out a bloody massacre at a beach resort last year. A sector that makes up 8 percent of the economy was badly damaged and is still recovering.
Unemployment has been constantly in double digits. It was 15.6 percent in September, and twice as high in rural communities. Graduates make up a third of the jobless.
In office since August, Chahed, a French-trained agriculture specialist and ally of President Beji Caid Essebsi, promises his government will be improve the fortunes of the youth. Public finances, corruption and security are at the top of his list.
Calling for “exceptional decisions and sacrifices,” he sees more revenue coming from stability in vital industries like phosphate and from a crackdown on fiscal evasion. He wants new taxes, subsidy cuts and a freeze on public wage hikes to control the deficit.
A new program called “Dignity Contract” will encourage employers to hire unemployed youth, with the government shouldering two thirds of the 600 dinars ($267) a month wage.
“Everyone has to make a sacrifice because it’s a difficult time,” Chahed told the Achourouk newspaper. “If we can’t all save our house, it’s going to collapse in on all of us.”
But new taxes are unpopular, and talk of trimming the public sector wage bill — at 13.5 percent of GDP proportionately one of the highest in the world — is sensitive in a country where many cling to the Ben Ali-era view that the state should act as one of the main providers of employment.
Already his plans to freeze public sector wage hikes and hiring have been rejected by the UGTT, a powerful labour union, which warned about the threat to social peace. The UTICA business association also rejected a new tax. — Reuters
