Tunisia:8 years after uprising socioeconomic injustice still persist

Tunisia is often touted as the Arab Spring’s only success story – and for good reason.
Since 2011, the North African country has held free and fair elections, seen incumbents peacefully step down, and – in a first for the region – pushed forward legislation to grant women equal inheritance rights.
But eight years after street protests forced Tunisia’s long-time authoritarian ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to step down, the economic malaise that prompted the popular uprising has anything but subsided – particularly in the historically marginalised southern and central regions.
“What can be described as a dramatic transformation at the political level has not translated into economic and social gains for the majority,” said Larbi Sadiki, a professor of political science at Qatar University.
“The shift from popular uprising to institutional politics has not been smooth and has benefited the few, various cliques, often at the expense of the immediate interests of citizens throughout Tunisia’s various regions
The scale of the regional imbalance in economic resources was evident in Ben Ali’s final budget prior to his January 2011 overthrow, which allocated a mere 18 percent of state funds to the country’s inner regions. The rest, 82 percent, went to the coastal towns.
In fact, such has been the traditional disparity between the industrialised coast and north, and the rural southern and central areas that its easing was enshrined in Tunisia’s post-revolution constitution, which envisioned devolving some powers and economic resources to the neglected regions.
But the persisting inequality, coupled with rampant unemployment (estimated at more than 15 percent), and anger at the failure of successive governments, has repeatedly led many Tunisians in recent years to take their grievances to the streets.
Most recently, the apparent self-immolation of an underemployed photojournalist in the central city of Kasserine brought once again the country’s wide economic imbalance and the authorities’ response to it into sharp focus.
“I am going to set myself on fire,” 32-year-old Abderrazak Zorgui can be heard saying in a video shared on Facebook prior to his death last month.

“The government needs to take an interest in what’s happening in Kasserine… Are we not human in Kasserine?”
Like Mohamed Bouazizi, the young fruit vendor from the impoverished city of Sidi Bouzid who set himself on fire and triggered what later came to be known as the Jasmine Revolution, Zorgui hailed from a town that seemed to be neglected by the central authorities.
And while Zorgui’s brother has maintained the journalist was only trying to rally support for his cause, and that a gang of youth actually set him on fire against his will, acts of self-immolation have nevertheless witnessed a threefold increase in the period between 2011 and 2016.