All the transport ministers of the post-revolution governments have been there. From unannounced visits to pretended surprise visits, everything was done at Tunisair. From night to day, all the visits have been organized at the national carrier, rarely at its headquarters and always at Tunis-Carthage airport.
Tunisair is a public company that has had at least eight CEOs since the revolution, and where the broom has always been waved between ministers and company directors. Even the last President of the Republic of Tunisia went there to listen to the CEO and his transport minister, who were at loggerheads.
Tunisair has been the subject of all kinds of investigations, both internal and external, including by the Court of Auditors, into almost everything imaginable. Employees – including trade unionists and former CEOs – have been heard and investigated, and the last of the Mohicans has been locked up and forgotten in his jail cell, like many other public CEOs and private businessmen.
Everyone came to see the damage, but no one came with solutions.
Almost every head of government since 2011 has at one time or another held a copy of a recovery plan, or a plan for the social and financial restructuring of the company. Plans that have been updated several times and each time returned to the drawers of the respective transport ministers because the solution has not changed since then. Turned on its head, studied from every angle and then rejected again, the solution remains financial.
Every year it becomes more expensive, especially to finance the redundancy plan and to refinance the very heavy debt, but this solution has always been rejected as a denial of pregnancy and postponed indefinitely, again because of the lack of resources on the part of the state shareholder, which refuses to increase the capital, to inject new money and even less to open up the capital to the private sector.
As early as May 2019, Chahed clearly stated that he did not have the money to save Tunisair, after the first Minister of Transport following the aforementioned revolution, Yassine Brahim, had drowned it in manpower by integrating all the subsidiaries.
He said it clearly and bluntly during the national dialogue on transport. When someone tells me that Tunisair needs 1.5 or 1.2 million Tunisian dinars, you have to know what you’re talking about,’ he says with a wry smile. It’s as if we had the money and didn’t want to give it to get Tunisair back on its feet,’ he says with a rueful look.
TND 8.3 million in personnel costs per aircraft. More than TND 53,000 per employee, or an average of TND 5,888 per month and per employee, and an average of 157 employees per aircraft (2,982 for 19 aircraft in operation in September 2024), which is abnormal in terms of the cabin crew/aircraft ratio that determines an airline’s profitability (European regulations would require 1 cabin crew member per full or incomplete block of 50 seats over 19 seats).
Missing balance sheets and indicators that say nothing
The last balance sheet of this listed company, protected by the CMF and the TSE, dates from 2019.
The financial year ended with a deficit of 183.121 million Tunisian dinars, negative retained earnings of more than 1.1 billion Tunisian dinars, share capital of less than 106.2 million Tunisian dinars and loans of more than 747.5 million Tunisian dinars. After this date, Tunisair will no longer publish financial statements, nor will this listed company hold a general meeting to discuss the balance sheet and distribute dividends.
Quarterly activity indicators for the first nine months of 2024 show a very slight increase in the number of passengers carried by Tunisair, and the company’s transport revenue (1,222.379 million Tunisian dinars) increased slightly (1,215.1 million Tunisian dinars at September 30? 2023), but the load factor decreased slightly (72.1% compared to 73.9%) and Tunisair’s market share decreased by 2 basis points.
Indicators show an improvement in fleet punctuality of between 36% and 48%. But delays to Tunisair aircraft remain endemic. Delays and cancellations have continued since the first of this month following a series of unexpected and highly suspicious ‘technical breakdowns’ that have put part of the Tunisian airline’s fleet out of action,” reported the Italian news agency Nova.
Only money counts, everything else is weakness
Faced with all these problems, first and foremost financial and then management, Tunisia’s leaders, old and new, have only been able to disguise their inability to inject money by successively and repeatedly sacking CEOs and directors of all kinds. Changes have been made in cacophony.
First it was Habib Mekki, former director-general of civil aviation before becoming a member of the cabinet of the current transport minister, who was appointed chairman of Tunisair’s board of directors, and then Montassar Bnouni, appointed director-general of Tunisair Express last June, who was installed at the head of Tunisair.
Meanwhile, just a few days before the Minister of Transport sacked a number of senior managers, three of whom were said to have visited El-Aouina to investigate technical problems, and appointed a former customs officer who had joined Tunisair under Khaled Chelly, Halima Khouaja was put in charge of the general management, again by the Minister of Transport.
In our opinion, all this is just administrative posturing to give the illusion of a solution, because the solution to Tunisair’s problems is almost exclusively financial, in a state that suffers from a blatant lack of money. And to parody Alfred de Vigny, who spoke of silence, we could say that ‘only money is great, all else is weakness!
