Tunisia: Unemployed graduates demand the Authority finds solution to their unemployment

On Thursday, unemployed high-level education graduates in Tunisia demanded the Authorities stop making promises and find practical solutions to employ them.

This came in a press conference at the headquarters of the National Syndicate of Tunisian Journalists in the centre of the capital, Tunis, with the participation of several high-level education graduates who have been unemployed for more than ten years.

The participants of the press conference confirmed that their protest movements will continue in the upcoming period with two protests scheduled currently, for 26 July and next, on 4 August.

The representative of the unemployed graduates who hold higher degrees, Yusra Nagy, told Anadolu Agency on the margins of the press conference: “Our first demand is proved, which is our right to be assigned in the public (governmental) positions, and to rehabilitate us after years of forced unemployment.”

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“The President (Kais Saied) let us down and disappointed us after passing Law 38 in the dissolved Parliament; then its activation remains mere illusion and did not see the light until today,” Nagy added.

Law 38 issued by Tunisian Parliament on 29 July, 2020, stipulates for exceptional assignment of holders of higher degrees whose unemployment period has reached ten years. The law was approved by the Tunisian Parliament in August of the same year.

Nagy added that she, like the rest of the unemployed persons, “was frustrated because the Articles of the draft Constitution submitted to a referendum did not contain texts to solve their dilemma (continuous unemployment)”, or to replace the Articles with an initiative to employ them in private companies’ sector.”

According to the Presidential decree issued by President Saied, a popular referendum on a new draft constitution for the country will be implemented on 25 July.

Nagy called on President Saied to “the necessity of carrying out a calculation of all vacancies in the public sector by a committee supervised personally by the President, with a participation of a representative of the unemployed graduates who hold higher degrees, and revealing all those who were assigned and proven to have submitted a forged higher degree.”

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The number of holders of higher degrees who are unemployed for more than ten years reached about 10,000 university graduates, while the unemployment rate in Tunisia in the first quarter of this year was 16.1 per cent, according to data from the Tunisian National Institute of statistics (governmental).

Since 25 July, 2021, Tunisia has witnessed a severe political crisis when President Saied imposed exceptional measures including dissolving the Supreme Judicial Council and Parliament, in which the Ennahda Movement had the largest bloc, issuing legislation by Presidential decrees and implementing a referendum on a new draft constitution, on current 25 July.

Tunisian forces, including the Ennahda Movement, consider these measures as a “coup against the constitution”, while other forces see them as a “correction of the course of the 2011 revolution”, which toppled the former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (1987-2011).