Corruption Helped Fuel Tunisia Revolt
Ben LebeauxWell before western news agencies turned their lenses toward Tunisia, Al Jazeera had already been publicizing the protests, which led to the abdication of former dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. And as images of the protesters—both men and women—beamed throughout the Arab world, I imagine that government officials felt a small twinge of fear.
Unemployment was one of the main causes for the recent uprising: Tunisia had more than 13% unemployment in 2010. Indeed, the movement began when “a college-educated street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi in the small town of Sidi Bouzid burned himself to death in despair at the frustration and joblessness confronting many educated young people here,” writes David D. Kirkpatrick in The New York Times. The town where Bouazizi killed himself has become a rallying cry for protesters, particularly on Twitter.
Tunisia is a fairly modernized country—former president Habib Bourguiba “poured resources into Tunisia’s educational system and made higher education effectively free. He also pushed a social agenda of secularization, women’s rights, and family planning that. . . slowed population growth, keeping the job of public education and social welfare manageable.” It’s a fairly impressive system of social services, particularly for an African country. So how on earth did it get so bad that a young man burnt himself to death?
While it certainly wasn’t the only issue affecting Tunisia’s prosperity, governmental corruption probably played an important part. Transparency International has reported in a rise in the perception of corruption in Tunisia in recent years. Protesters consistently invoked the president’s second wife, "the former Leila Trabelsi, a hairdresser from a humble family whose relatives have amassed conspicuous fortunes since her 1992 marriage.”
“We are suffering from what the Trabelsis stole,” said one protester. “Every major sector in Tunisia has been taken. They own part of telecommunications, they own part of the car business, they own part of the supermarkets, everything.”
According to Freedom House, the family “has benefited handsomely from the state privatization of firms. Entire state assets have been privatized without competitive bidding and in many cases, entire state monopolies have been transferred in whole to a new private owner. . . . In most cases of state privatization, patronage, not competition, has dictated who got what.” The Trabelsis—and, likely, Ben Ali himself—benefited a great deal. Freedom House even alleges that the Trabelsis used “dubious bank loans to. . . further build their portfolio. These are bank loans which have no date for repayment.”
These are serious allegations, and they demand investigation as soon as the new government can restore order to the streets. But it also bears remembering for the other governments in the region—as well as our own. While corruption helped bring down Tunisia's leadership, Tunisia actually ranks as one of the less corrupt countries in the Middle East and North Africa.