My American and British friends often ask me, "does democracy
really have a shot at success in North Africa?" They are referring of
course to the so-called Arab Spring uprisings three years ago, which
began in Tunisia on December 17, 2010, when a young fruit vendor,
Mohammed Bouazizi set himself afire to protest ridiculous laws that made
it impossible for him to earn a living. Incredibly, only 28 days later
the government of the dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali collapsed. Ben
Ali and his wife fled to Khartoum with a plane-full of gold bars.
Of
course, I am only an observer of these events from Senegal and France,
though I feel, like all Africans, that I have a vested interest in the
success of these democratic changes in North Africa, in the hope that
they will be the harbingers of positive change throughout the continent.
Western
donors and lenders were quick to respond to these changes in Tunisia.
The interim government reached agreements with the EU, the World Bank,
and the African Development Bank for emergency monies to create and
support the new democratic government. The cash started pouring in,
about $3 billion so far for Tunisia. It came also with a swarm of
international policy advisors in Tunis to help leaders with little or no
public sector experience run the ministries from whom most of the Ben
Ali government had been fired. Unfortunately, much of their advice has
been ignored by Tunisia's new crop of inexperienced politicians.
Excluding
so many talented people from the Ben Ali regime was a mistake. Tunisia
is especially blessed with talented technocrats who were no more
responsible for Ben Ali than most American civil servants were
responsible for Richard Nixon. Only one holdover from the Ben Ali
regime, Abdelhamid Triki, a gifted manager and technocrat with no
political baggage, was allowed to be a part of the new government. He
had previously served as minister of planning and international
cooperation. It was largely under his leadership and with his powers of
persuasion that the Tunisian government was able to generate so much
international financial support so fast.
Meanwhile, thousands of
gifted technocrats, including such figures as Oussama Romdhani, the
Georgetown University Fulbright scholar who ran the Communications
Ministry, and former Ambassador to the US and to the UK Hatem Atallah,
men who are young enough and smart enough to make significant
contributions to the new Tunisia, are sitting at home writing their
memoirs, excluded from the new regime because of ties to the now
despised Ben Ali. This is foolish and a waste of talent tiny Tunisia
cannot afford.
Perhaps as a result of this, the Islamist-leaning
Enhada political party, which won the first round of elections in
Tunisia, has been unable to make much progress in drafting a new
constitution and getting much traction. Recall that Tunisia is a country
where women's rights are arguably more advanced that in the United
States, thanks to reforms made in the 1960s by Tunisia's first
autocratic leader, Bourgiba. Half the lawyers in Tunisia today are
women, as are half the physicians. It is not likely that these women
will voluntarily leave the 21st century to return with veils to the 11th
century.
In the three years since the suicide of the fruit vendor
who began the Jasmine Revolution, Tunisia's leaders have put forth a
reform agenda which international financial support has helped to refine
and support. Huge changes have occurred in civil society, such as total
freedom of media expression, the right to assemble to discuss political
ideas, and the creation of a significant new number of NGOs.
Elections
in 2011 brought to power a new crop of elected officials to draft a new
constitution. The Islamist Enhada party, which has been dubbed
"MB-Lite" by pundits in Egypt and Tunisia, was unable to win a full
majority of votes in a country so modern and secular as Tunisia, and so
it had to form a coalition with two non-religious political parties.
But
in the two years since not much has happened. Critics in Europe say the
new regime, which has failed to make use of Tunisia's huge reservoir of
highly educated and well-trained technocrats, must work more quickly to
revamp old laws on business, trade, banking, and investment left over
from the old regime. These laws created monopolies that favored tiny,
favored groups.
Tunisia has enormous economic potential. It is a
tiny country like Singapore with literacy approaching one hundred per
cent and no rural poor. It is a city-state, much like Venice in the
Middle Ages, with a long tradition of international trade and commerce.
Tunisians for centuries have survived by creating strong economic links
all across the Mediterranean Basin. Even today, economic agreements with
the EU make it possible for anything manufactured in Tunisia to be sold
anywhere in the EU without tariffs. This makes it possible for
multinationals to profit from Tunisia's lower wages to make products
like air-conditioners and televisions that can sell at competitive
prices throughout Germany and France.
But the pace of reform has
been slow and the inexperienced Enhada politicians have often appeared
to be tripping over their own shoelaces. Foreign direct investment has
virtually stopped as large multinationals look for signs of significant
investment incentives, and a series of political murders and a suicide
bomber have put a dent in Tunisia main hard currency earner, tourism.
Something like eight million tourists a year visit Tunisia, a country
with a population only slightly greater than that.
The secular
opposition parties who oppose Enhada's religious agenda took the
collapse of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as a signal to demand that
the Enhada politicians relinquish power. This has caused a logjam that
has pretty much paralyzed the country, delaying the work needed for a
new constitution.
Some Tunisians are now less hopeful about
democracy taking root in their country than they were two years ago. New
elections must be held, but Enhada still has enough clout to delay what
they see as their inevitable loss of power. While there is much more
civil discourse, the Islamists have occasionally threatened to use old
Ben Ali laws to suppress dissent. That terrifies Tunisians who remember
only too well what it is like to live under a dictatorship.
But it
is more likely that the economic changes that have been spurred by the
World Bank and other loans are probably irreversible now. Many believe
that it is economic change that will drive political change. Tunisia is
already the richest nation, on a per capita basis, of any country in the
Southern Mediterranean, and to the extent that the economically well
off demand better schools for their children and better cars and houses
for themselves, it seems inevitable that the next ten years will make
modern Tunisia look more like Singapore and less like Iran than ever
before. And that will likely mean widespread economic and political
improvement throughout the Southern Med. It is far too soon to give up
on Tunisian democracy. Indeed, all of Africa is waiting for success
there.
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