It cannot be said often enough, especially on this Labour Day and UN Press Freedom Day, that populist rhetoric does not put food on people’s plates.
Spending taxpayers’ money on various consumer items will not increase GDP. Only investment will create wealth for the country and the added value will be redistributed to the population, who will be the only ones to pay the price for the haphazard management of the state budget since 2021 and even before.
They alone will pay for the debt, the recession, the delay in growth and the domino effect of rising prices.
Wages have risen by only 1.3% (INS Q2 2023 figures); prices are rising all the time. On the other hand, there are simple declarations of investment by a private sector under cabal and on standby, which generally have a low rate of realization, mounted on a pin by officials who need public investment as a way of making good for their armchairs.
The lion’s share for investments and 47% for salaries
In terms of figures, and until the end of November 2023, since the data is published 5 months late by a Ministry of Finance that still seems to work with primary school notebook paper and pencil, the state has spent only TND 3.7 billion on public investment in 11 months out of its TND 34.4 billion in taxes taken from the pockets of Tunisians.
A mere 9.3% of its resources, compared with TND 19.632 billion in public wages, TND 1.560 billion in administrative expenditure, TND 10.810 billion in social intervention expenditure and TND 5.074 billion in credit financing costs.
Kaïs Saïed’s government is borrowing everywhere (TND 3.041 billion from abroad, TND 2.062 billion from local banks and bondholders at the end of November, not counting the TND 7 billion from the BCT and TND 3.78 billion from the ITFC in Saudi Arabia) in order to avoid having to borrow from the IMF, which has demanded that it carry out reforms to remain solvent and bankable.
We might as well do without in order to invest in wealth creation and pay for our own bread out of our own pockets.
Ask the Treasury, if you can, because we are kindly blacklisted by the Minister, and she will tell you that she has more pressing matters to attend to. That means paying salaries, paying pensions, which she does not increase, does not equalize, and which she collects in taxes, VAT and other levies.
Investments are discussed in the closed meetings of “Dar El Bey”, the current government palace in La Kasbah, while waiting for the credits, which are usually paid directly into a catch-all budget and spent on imports of basic products to interrupt the recurring shortages for a while.
Paying more taxes, watching unemployment rise, inflation go up and down, chasing other people’s money by any means necessary, pensions frozen, queuing for shortages.
It might as well be for a good cause. Investment and more jobs to improve things, and the prosperity promised by all those revolutions.
Not to hear more denunciations of conspiracies by everyone and everything, and medical and ICT experts fleeing abroad. Not to see the freedom of speech of others, including and above all the press, curtailed, and the relations of the state, public companies, financial companies and others deteriorating, and the system becoming more and more closed every day!
