Tunisia’s crisis

In Tunisia, decades of poor governance and lack of investment in the healthcare system have led to the terrible reality where any health emergency can quickly turn into an unmanageable situation. The persistent political instability in the country – which had three presidents and eight prime ministers since the 2011 revolution – has made it difficult to implement long term, sustainable and effective health policies.

It is not a surprise that the factors that hindered Tunisia’s ability to respond to the Covid-19 crisis effectively are similar to those that have limited the response capacity in countries like Lebanon, South Africa and Cuba throughout this public health emergency. In these countries and many others in the Global South, people took to the streets in large numbers to protest against their governments because the pandemic added further urgency to the existing threats of medical and economic collapse.

In Tunisia, the public’s deep dissatisfaction with the government’s handling of the Covid crisis was an important reason behind the anti-government protests that led President Kais Saied to suspend Parliament on July 25 and plunge the country into another political crisis.

Since then, however, Saied’s politically motivated actions have not helped but further hindered Tunisian institutions’ ability to implement the necessary measures to stem the spread of the Delta variant. For example, on August 1, as the number of new cases, hospitalisations and deaths remained on the rise, Saied decided to issue a presidential decree to shorten the nationwide curfew. Even worse, he chose to take a walk along the iconic Avenue Habib Bourguiba in the capital Tunis, flouting urgent Covid-19 restrictions for political gain. Saied has since appointed a military doctor as his interim health minister, bypassing the constitutional restriction to appoint ministers and leveraging vaccine rollout to broaden his political gain.

For instance, despite the fact that only 12 percent of Tunisia’s population is fully vaccinated, a recent successful vaccine drive, which saw more than half a million people being vaccinated in one day, has been hailed by local media and Saied’s supporters as a proof of his successful political leadership and ability get things back to normal. Meanwhile, local authorities have no available data, clear messaging, or effective policies about how they will respond to the possible surge of post-vaccination breakthrough infections.

It is impossible to ignore the role incompetent local authorities motivated by their own political interests have played in exacerbating the Covid-19 crisis in Tunisia and across the Global South. However, the moral failure of the leaders of the Global North, who paved the way for what the WHO now openly calls ‘vaccine apartheid’, is equally – if not primarily – responsible for the ongoing Covid-19 calamity in the Global South. Indeed, to date, only about 2 percent of Africans have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19.