Without the Public Prosecutor’s Office enforces the 54 (decree), as it did against journalists, media workers and even photographers, fake news stories, sometimes fabricated in deep fakes mode, appear on social networks announcing the arrest of this or that businessman or the imposition of a travel ban on this or that person.
Fakes that circulate in a loop on social networks as they are shared – innocently or not, it doesn’t matter – sowing fear in families and freezing any desire for enterprise or investment on the part of those affected.
That ‘industry’ of fakes, has become one of the ways to make money, monetizing their likely interventions to get certain people off certain lists or to install a climate of little political purpose.
Information to solve everything
Without in any way questioning the work of the judiciary, and even less the “war” against corruption that the judiciary itself is waging with such vigor, it is fair to say that the Public Prosecutor’s Office does not seem to be taking swift action against these new professionals of disinformation.
And even the information, the real, verified and verifiable information that contributes to the president’s ‘war of liberation’, is only provided in exceptional cases, such as Abdelaziz Makhloufi, better known as president of the CSS than as an olive oil exporter.
For others who have been arrested, and who are not among the few on the so-called “list of 50”, a list of names that has been leaked for months and has never been confirmed or denied, there is judicial silence.
That silence could give some credibility to certain online lies spread by well-organized hordes on the Tunisian web.
Other posts, though less dangerous for the economy and investment, have provoked a reaction from the same prosecutors who remain silent when it comes to businessmen, leaving them open to all those who envy them and all those who preach egalitarianism in terms of income and wealth.
Who benefits silently from the falsifications?
One could be forgiven for thinking that all this is part of a plot and a conspiracy, as the President of the Republic of Tunisia would rightly say, against investment, by creating and maintaining an atmosphere of fear that makes local entrepreneurs cower when it comes to investing. And by making the authorities believe that local Tunisian capital does not want to invest, by conspiring against the current government to make it difficult for it to fulfill its electoral promises of jobs, economic recovery and a 3.1% growth rate, as announced by Kamel Madouri to the two chambers at the end of last week.
The same silence, which is no less open to criticism despite our firm belief in the usefulness of this war, is also on the fate of high-ranking officials, some of whom have been in prison for almost a year, without the people in whose name everything is done knowing what they are officially accused of or where the investigations stand.
