National projects with lower priority

Habib Touhami – After the 2011 “revolution”, all Tunisia talked about was jobs and unemployment. The media, public opinion, social and political organizations, civil society, foreign speakers and universities have made jobs and unemployment the dominant theme of the post-revolutionary political and socio-economic debate and the top priority of any new government. Thirteen years later, the subject has almost disappeared from public debate and from the attention of those in power. Almost everyone has turned their backs on it, some out of fatalism, others out of cynicism. The issue of jobs and unemployment has become a debased subject in every sense of the word.

However, despite immigration, the employment and unemployment situation continues to deteriorate. But the unemployment data published by the immigration authorities do not fully reflect the extent of this deterioration. In fact, they do not overemphasize the accelerated development of structural unemployment, the increasing instability of private sector employment, the lack of overall net job creation and the lack of any prospects for improvement in the medium term, especially due to the maintenance of employment policies that have already shown their limitations. In fact, nothing has changed in this regard, and the evidence is the maintenance of the wait-and-see fantasy, according to which unemployment will automatically decrease with high growth rates.

In any case, the overall unemployment rate in the first quarter of 2024 is 16.2%, including 13.6% for men and 28.2% for women. But the unemployment rate of higher education graduates has not shown the expected improvement. Of course, it has fallen from 33.1% in the fourth quarter of 2011 to 23.2% in the fourth quarter of 2023, but this decline is smaller and is due to the increase in net job creation rather than the relative decline in the potential activity of the population (immigration + structural effect). For its part, the employed active population in the second quarter of 2023 was 4.096 million, compared to 3.909 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, a net increase of 187,000, the lowest level in 12 years.

Beyond these figures and their necessarily contradictory interpretations, what is important in the current situation is the worsening of the employment and unemployment problem at the media, government and political levels. This issue is no longer the country’s first priority, or even the tenth. The rise in consumer prices and the decline in the purchasing power of the vast majority of Tunisians have caused a dramatic change in the order of national priorities. This is regrettable.

Habib Touhami