South Africa’s Mineworkers Who Have Paid the Price

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Peoples Dispatch.

Tensions simmering between Sudan’s army and the powerful paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) boiled over into armed clashes on the morning of Saturday, April 15, following disagreements over the integration of the autonomous RSF into the army’s command chain.

The issue of integration was a key aspect of a deal that Sudan’s ruling junta was to sign with right-wing civilian forces to share power with the latter. The left in Sudan has been critical of the proposed deal, questioning the sincerity of the parties. Speaking to Peoples Dispatch a few hours before the fighting broke out, the Sudanese Communist Party’s Foreign Relations Secretary, Saleh Mahmoud, said “Both the forces, the army and the RSF, have a mutual interest in escalating armed conflict, so that it can be used as a reason to not hand over power to the civilian forces.”

According to the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), the air force carried out strikes destroying RSF’s Tiba and Soba base in Khartoum State on Saturday. Heavy gunfire began in the morning in several cities, including in the vicinity of the Presidential Palace and the airport in the capital Khartoum city.

Earlier, the RSF, which is led by the ruling military junta’s deputy chairman, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, aka Hemeti, claimed to have taken control of the Presidential Palace, the seat of the junta’s chairman and army chief, General Abdel Fattah al Burhan.

Later, however, after continued fighting, the SAF claimed that the RSF troops had left their weapons behind and fled the the presidential palace area to hide in the residential areas. The army has called on the residents to stay home.

The RSF had also claimed to have taken control of the airports in Khartoum and in El-Obeid, over 400 km southwest of Khartoum in the state of North Kordofan. It also claimed control over the military airbase in Merowe, 200 km to Khartoum’s north, in the Northern State which borders Egypt.

While Hemeti is backed by the UAE, Egypt, which is said to be backing Burhan in this internal struggle, reportedly has planes in this airbase, making it a crucial infrastructure.

On April 12, at least a hundred RSF vehicles surrounded this airbase. Sudan Tribune reported that  “the army surrounded the RSF troops and requested them to evacuate but the paramilitary force refused.” Subsequently, military vehicles of the RSF also rolled into Khartoum and several other cities.

Complaining that “this deployment and repositioning” of the RSF “clearly violates the law,” the SAF spokesperson issued a statement at 3 a.m. on Thursday, warning that the  “continuation” of such deployments “will inevitably cause more divisions and tensions that may lead to the collapse of security in the country.”

According to the RSF, which first issued a statement on the fighting, clashes began after a surprise attack by the army on its troops in Soba, before simultaneous attacks on its bases in several other cities. The SAF has in turn accused the RSF of lying to conceal its own aggression.

RSF and the Army Worked Together to Protect Military Rule from Pro-Democracy Movement

Established in 2013, the RSF was formed by coalescing the various militias used by the state during the civil war in Darfur in the 2000s to commit alleged war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

Omar al-Bashir, the former dictator under whose administration these alleged crimes were committed, stands trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC). He was forced out of power on April 11, 2019, about four months after the start of the pro-democracy protests that have come to be known as the December Revolution.

By the time of his ouster, the RSF had become, and remains, one of the most powerful organizations in the country with a vast financial network built on mining gold in Darfur. Hemeti had pledged over a billion dollars to help stabilize Sudan’s central bank in the aftermath of Bashir’s removal.

Such increasing power and influence of the RSF have been making the army uneasy over the years. Reports about underlying tensions between the Burhan and Hemeti have been frequent. However, united with the intent to maintain military rule and protect it from the December Revolution, the two forces had been working together.

The junta formed by the generals in Bashir’s security committee after his removal was chaired by army chief Burhan, who in turn declared RSF head Hemeti his deputy on April 12, 2019, exactly four years before he would deploy the RSF to surround Merowe military airbase.

When the mass sit-in demonstration occupying the square outside the army HQ continued after Bashir’s removal, insisting on a civilian administration, the junta deployed the RSF on June 3, 2019. In the massacre that followed, RSF troops killed over a hundred protesters, wounding many more and raping several while the army watched over from its HQ.

Right-Wing Parties Seek Compromise with the Military Junta, Again

In the aftermath of this massacre, right-wing parties in the coalition, Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC), entered into negotiations with the junta, forming a joint civilian-military transitional government in August 2019. In protest against this compromise, the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP), a key player in the December Revolution, broke away from the FFC, which was formed in January that year to represent the pro-democracy protest movement.

Under this power-sharing arrangement with the FFC, the military controlled the defense, the police, the foreign policy, and much of Sudan’s economy. The little power that was ceded to the FFC-chosen civilians in this government was taken back with the military coup in October 2021, since when military rule has been absolute.

“No negotiations, No Compromise, No partnership” with the military, is a slogan that has been resonating in the mass-protests that have continued since the coup, regularly drawing hundreds of thousands to the streets in several towns and cities across the country.

Disregarding this popular call for the complete overthrow of the junta and the prosecution of its generals under a fully civilian transitional government, the FFC returned right back to negotiations after the coup, seeking a compromise and partnership with the military again.

The unpopular negotiations were supported by the Trilateral Mechanism, formed by the United Nations Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in Sudan (UNITAMS), African Union (AU), and the seven-countries regional bloc, Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD).

The United States threw its weight behind these negotiations, imposing pressure on the military as well as the right-wing FFC parties to make compromises and come to another power-sharing agreement.

Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which are backing Burhan, and the UAE, which is backing Hemeti, all want a military regime in Sudan, albeit with different hierarchical structures, Fathi Elfadl, national spokesperson of the SCP, told Peoples Dispatch.

“But the Americans,” he added, “have been pushing for a comprehensive agreement with the FFC to establish a civilian authority, which, however, will only serve as a cover for the real authority that will be invested in the Security and Defense Council controlled by the junta.”

Under much Western pressure and growing threats to their authority from the radical mass-movements below, the junta and the FFC signed a Framework Agreement in December 2022, laying the path toward a final political agreement on another power-sharing arrangement.

By then, at least 120 had been killed and thousands injured in the crackdown on pro-democracy protests by the army, the police, and the RSF. Yet, unwilling to compromise with the military, the network of over 5,000 local Resistance Committees (RCs) across Sudan, which have been leading the mass-protests since the coup, rejected the agreement, and vowed to continue mass-actions till the junta is toppled.

Hundreds of more protesters have since suffered injuries in the crackdown that has continued despite the junta’s commitment in the Framework agreement to respect “international human rights charters.. freedoms of peaceful assembly and expression”.

While the agreement stated that a civilian Prime Minister will be the supreme commander of the armed forces, Burhan clarified to media only days later that the “civilian Supreme Commander of the SAF” neither “presides over the army chief” nor appoints him, but “only approves recommendations made to him.”

Despite these demonstrations of bad faith, the FFC proceeded under the aegis of the trilateral mechanism to negotiate the contested issues left unresolved in the framework agreement.

These included the review of the Juba peace agreement which has brought no peace to the war-torn regions like Blue Nile and Darfur where hundreds of thousands have been displaced since in continuing armed attacks, mostly by the RSF and the militias it supports. Another contested issue was the nature of transitional justice for the victims of the June 3 massacre and other atrocities.

With several compromises, the FFC had found common ground with the junta on most of these issues by last month when the signatories of the framework agreement announced that the final political agreement will be signed by April 1. This was to be followed by a constitutional declaration on April 6, and finally, the establishment of the new joint transitional government by April 11, the anniversary of the overthrow of Bashir.

‘Only Way Out of the Crisis Is to Restore the Revolution’

However, on April 1, the signing of the political agreement was postponed to April 6, and then indefinitely delayed. The FFC said that the delay was caused due to a disagreement between the army and the RSF over the integration of the latter into the former’s structure.

While Burhan is insisting that the integration should take place within the two years of the transitional period by the end of which an election is to be held as per the agreement, Hemeti has refused, demanding 10 years.

“By lining up with the RSF in this dispute, the FFC has lost the little credibility they may have been left with after entering into negotiations with the junta for the second time,” SCP’s Foreign Relations Secretary, Saleh Mahmoud, told Peoples Dispatch.

While the FFC has denied the allegation, Middle East Eye reported that according to a draft of the final agreement it has seen, a period of 10 years had been agreed upon for this process of integration. Given that the FFC claims that it is only the disagreement within the security forces that is impeding the final agreement, the provision of 10 years in the draft might be an indication of the FFC’s willingness to allow the notorious paramilitary another decade of autonomy.

One explanation for the alleged siding of the FFC with the RSF is that the RSF agrees with the FFC that parties that have not signed the framework agreement should not be a part of the political agreement or have a share in state power. Burhan, however, has shown his keenness to also include other parties outside the framework agreement, especially those who had been in alliance with the ousted Bashir’s Islamist National Congress Party (NCP).

With the escalation of hostilities, however, the prospect of a final political agreement on the basis of the framework agreement has practically fallen apart, argued Mahmoud.

SCP reiterated in its statement that “the only way to get out of the crisis is to restore the revolution and establish the authority of the people.”

People have lived on both the Zimbabwean and Zambian sides of the Zambezi River of southern Africa for centuries. Their lives revolved around the river. They say their god, the nyami nyami, lives in its waters.

The Zambezi is Africa’s fourth-longest river, flowing from northwestern Zambia into Angola and Botswana, then forming the Zimbabwe-Zambia border, before it empties into the Indian Ocean off Mozambique to the east. For centuries, the people fished in this river, fetched drinking water from it and harvested crops twice a year on its fertile floodplains. As a result, they call themselves basilwizi, which, in their Tonga language, means the “people of the great river.”

Now, they are only basilwizi in name, with no water to drink or with which to grow crops. They need a government permit to fish on Lake Kariba or on the river further upstream.

“We are just here, thirsty,” BaTonga Chief Saba told Toward Freedom, as he stood in Binga District, Matabeleland North Province located in western Zimbabwe, some 800 km (497 miles) from the capital city of Harare. “Some of us drill boreholes, but even if they drill up to 100 meters (109 yards), they frequently hit dry holes. Where they are lucky to get [water], it will be salty due to the abundance of coal in this area. Come the dry season, the boreholes dry up. Even the hot springs we have yield salty water, as well.”

One of 17 BaTonga chiefs in the Binga District, Chief Saba’s parents were among the approximately 23,000 BaTonga villagers displaced from the southern bank of the Zambezi between 1957 and 1962. That made way for the construction of Lake Kariba, the world’s biggest dam constructed by humans. In Zambia, 34,000 people of the BaTonga tribe were removed, too. The 23,000 BaTonga people were scattered in four arid districts in Zimbabwe: Binga, Gokwe North, Hwange and Nyami Nyami. Their population has grown to about 300,000, while displaced in Zambia number 1.3 million.

‘Fish Is Our Gold’

The dam generates electricity that lights up the country. It is home to tourism facilities, as well as to the annual tiger-fishing contest that attracts tourists from southern Africa and beyond. However, the evictees are ranked among the country’s poorest, and trace their poverty to their removal from the fertile shores of the river and to their resettlement in arid places.

“We are people of the great river, so we demand access to it,” Chief Saba said. “Fish is our gold, so we want our people to have special clearance to fish on the lake as their fathers, grandfathers and ancestors used to do.”

Saba added his people want the government and its development partners to build irrigation to help alleviate poverty.

The Zimbabwe Peace Project, a local non-governmental organization (NGO), citing the 2017 Poverty Report by the Zimbabwe Statistical Agency, said Binga was the second highest impoverished district at between 38.4 percent and 51.2 percent. About 50.1 percent of households were classified as “extremely poor.” Food insecurity, as well as lack of access to health, educational and transport services, are rife.

The government is building a $48 million, 42-kilometer (26-mile) pipeline from Deka on the Zambezi River to transport water to cool a 1,500-megawatt, coal-fired power plant at Hwange.

“The pipeline is too far from us,” Chief Saba said. “If we were closer, perhaps we stood a chance of getting some water at communal water points that authorities always set up along such pieces of infrastructure to enable communities to benefit from exploitation of local resources. Because we don’t have reliable water sources, the only alternative is the Zambezi.”

Natural Resources Under Foot

Binga is situated in a coal-rich area. The southern African nation’s biggest coal mine, Hwange Colliery Company Limited, and about a dozen smaller ones, populate Hwange District, Binga’s southwestern neighbor.

The district is blessed with a number of natural resources, such as coal, diamond, gold, lithium, tantalite, timber, wildlife and the Zambezi River. However, the only resources being extracted are coal, timber, wildlife and fish.

In terms of fishing however, a Zimbabwean named Prince Mathe argued in a September 2021 paper, “Vulnerability and Contribution of Fisheries as a Livelihood Strategy in Kani ward, Binga, Zimbabwe,” that the cost of permits limits the BaTonga people’s access to the river and the lake.

“…If one is found fishing illegally, he or she pays a fine worth [sic] $1,500 … failure to do that, they face prosecution.”

The Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority has fixed the fishing permit for people using commercial motorized boats at $1,000 yearly and $300 for those using canoes.

‘Treated Like Animals’ 

About 57 percent of the land that now sits at the bottom of the lake was arable and owned by the BaTonga, says a Zimbabwean NGO that champions BaTonga rights, Basilwizi Trust, quoting a World Commission on Dams report on Lake Kariba. The document adds that the BaTonga were “‘treated like animals or things rounded up and packed in lorries’ to be moved to their new destination … The racist attitude of the time did not consider the resettlement of Africans as a problem.”

Basilwizi Trust adds:

“The dam’s poor record of resettlement left a huge black mark on the project, which has never been adequately addressed by the parties responsible for building the dam. The colonial and post-independence governments and the major funders and beneficiaries of the dam continue to neglect the relocated people on the Zimbabwean side of the reservoir.”

The trust has demanded reparations in the form of sustainable development programs/projects for the BaTonga and Korekore people in Nyami Nyami District. (While nyami nyami is the name of the BaTonga people’s god, a Zimbabwean district where other BaTonga were forced to move to is called Nyami Nyami. In that district, the BaTonga are called the Korekore people, while in Binga district they are called BaTonga.) The Zambian government compensated each displaced person with $270, but the BaTonga of Zimbabwe were not paid.

A recent paper, “Local knowledge and practices among Tonga people in Zambia and Zimbabwe: A review,” states that prior to the construction of Lake Kariba, the community mainly practiced flood retreat cultivation in their incelela, small plots of land along the riverbank. The mineral-rich soils combined with their system allowed the population to cover their basic needs and harvest twice a year. Now, poverty is widespread among the people.

“Although the dam was built to provide electricity in Zambia and Zimbabwe, up to today, Tonga people have scarce access to electricity,” it adds.

Bringing Water to the People

At Dopota Village in Chief Nelukoba’s area in Hwange District, the grievances are the same as those in Binga.

“We have a solar powered borehole in the village, but it is often without water,” Evans Shoko, head of Dopota Village, told Toward Freedom. “We rely on another one that was drilled in 1968 to serve Dopota Primary School, but it is also unreliable due to the general dryness in the area.”

One garden serves 22 out of 36 households in the village. The garden provides just enough vegetables to prepare relish and small parcels to sell to raise just enough money for isigayo. In the local Ndebele language, isigayo is the payment for milling maize, the country’s staple food.

“It is not transformative at all,” Shoko said, “so what the people want is water from the Zambezi for drinking and to support irrigation schemes.”

Shoko’s village is about 5 km (3.1 miles) away from the Deka-Hwange pipeline, so he hoped authorities would set up a point from which villagers could draw water.

The village is less than 6 miles from Hwange National Park. Shoko said animals, especially elephants, stray out of the park to look for food and water in the village, resulting in damaged crops.

“Sometimes they end up killing people.”

Matabeleland North Provincial Minister Richard Moyo said the government is aware of the challenges the BaTonga face.

“We are drilling boreholes in the district and pushing ahead with the Bulawayo Kraal Irrigation Scheme, which will see up to 15,000 hectares (37,000 acres) being put under irrigation,” he told Toward Freedom. The Bulawayo Kraal is about 10 km (6.2 miles) south of the Zambezi River in Binga District.

Moyo said, as of October, the province had drilled about three boreholes out of 17, which are earmarked for chiefs’ homesteads. Last year, President Emmerson Mnangagwa allocated a fishing rig to each of the district’s 17 chiefs, Moyo added. Through this program, the people are able to fish, obtain relish and sell surpluses. Plus, jobs operating the rigs have been created. Moyo said some people in the district would benefit from the Gwayi-Shangani Dam project because of nutritional gardens and irrigation schemes.

“But the issue is not just about water,” Moyo said. “We are building roads, the Binga airstrip is now operational after the government rehabilitated it, so tourism is picking up. Binga Polytechnic [College] enrolled its first intake [of students] last year… So, yes, there are challenges, but we are not leaving Binga behind.”

Thulani Mpofu is a Zimbabwean freelance journalist based in Harare, the capital.  He has an interest in development issues.  Some of his work has appeared in Canada-headquartered Natural Gas World, Thailand-based Tobacco Asia and South Africa’s Farmers Weekly.

SFAX, Tunisia—Until the first week of December, mountains of garbage littered the center of the coastal city of Sfax. For more than two months, locals put up with thousands of tons of rotten household trash and hazardous medical waste left uncollected in public areas.

The crisis began after Sfax governorate authorities closed in late September the governorate’s main controlled landfill, El Gonna, in the town of Agareb, some 22 kilometers (13.6 miles) from the city of Sfax, due to opposition from the local population. (Tunisia is divided into provinces called governorates. Sfax governorate contains a city by the same name.)

The people of Agareb rejected the Ministry of Environment reopening the controversial dumping site. Residents said it was full and being used to dump toxic chemical waste, causing the spread of several diseases. Reported health complications include respiratory and skin disorders, sight problems, and infertility.

Some private waste-management companies are known to illegally dispose of toxic material—such as medical refuse and industrial waste from factories—in the landfill to avoid expensive treatment processes.

Protests Turn Deadly

Opened in 2008 as a near-term fix to ease the burden on the Sfax governorate, the dump at Agareb was originally supposed to close after five years.

“We had a problem of trust with the government, which has still not implemented the solutions that they had announced,” said Sami Bahri, a Agareb-based environmental activist, during a webinar Paris-based think tank Arab Reform Initiative organized in December.

Weeks of protests against the trash crisis and the reopening of the landfill last month escalated on November 8 when security forces’ tear gas killed a protester. The next day, angry demonstrators burned a local national guard station. “We are choking on all this garbage!” was one of the main slogans of the day’s rallies.

The closure of the El Gonna site, which had already been overloaded since September, led to the accumulation of garbage and industrial waste on the streets of Sfax city. Local municipal services had stopped trash collection, citing a lack of alternatives for waste disposal.

“We are in a situation where seeing garbage in the open air becomes something ordinary,” said Hafez Hentati, coordinator of Collectif de l’environnement et du développement de Sfax (Environmental and Development Collective of Sfax) in the city of Sfax, speaking in an exclusive interview with Toward Freedom. “It’s dangerous for all economic and social activity, besides being a human health issue.”

The militant, who’s been campaigning on environmental issues for nearly 40 years, estimated above 44,000 tons of rubbish were discharged into the environment without any treatment for more than 70 days after the main landfill shut down.

“Sfax’s garbage issues have been ongoing since long ago,” said Aida Kchaou, a painter and active member of civil society in Sfax, in an interview with Toward Freedom. She alluded to years of government neglect. “People are used to dumping trash carelessly as if they want to punish the state somehow.”

The artist cannot remain indifferent to how environmental conditions have degraded in her region. In 2015, she performed an act of protest on Chaffar Beach, 26 kilometers (or 16 miles) south of the city of Sfax, by wearing plastic garbage bags and picking litter to raise awareness of the decaying state of the seashore because of long-time chemical industries in Sfax governorate.

Kchaou has paid more than one visit to Agareb, meeting residents and local activists, and taking part in small actions in the vicinity of uncontrolled hazardous landfills, very close to residential areas. Recently, she staged an action by standing in the middle of a dump near Agareb, holding her paintbrush as if she was going to cover all of the rubbish with paint. She ended by planting an olive tree. “I live my environment: I see there’s something wrong and I react,” the painter said.

Monem Kallel, professor at the National School of Engineering of Sfax and an environmental expert, pointed out the waste crisis is essentially connected with the method of burying waste in open dumps, which Tunisia has adopted for about 24 years.

“It’s an old policy—one of the worst approaches to waste management—that leaves the fate of the litter unknown and makes people think the state will take care of it,” the expert observed while speaking to Toward Freedom. “Meanwhile, the country’s dumps are getting filled up, and people are growing fed up with the accumulation of unremoved garbage.” He stressed an urgent solution to waste dumping, such as immediately hauling it away, must be accompanied by the longer-term sustainable process of sorting, treatment and recycling.

Striking Against Structural Stench

In the face of growing waste mismanagement, posing serious health and environmental risks, civil society groups in Sfax governorate announced they would hold a general regional strike on December 10. They also successfully filed a legal complaint against the parties responsible for the ecological catastrophe, namely the environment ministry, the National Waste Management Agency (Agence Nationale de Gestion des Déchets, or ANGED for short) and the region’s municipalities.

With the local and national government coming under pressure—just a few days before the anticipated strike—the prime minister’s cabinet decided to resume on December 8 the clearance and dumping of household waste in a temporary collection point located near the port. This plan depended on the rubbish heaps being transported within five months to a new landfill to be created on the road to a town in Sfax governorate’s countryside called Menzel Chaker, about 62 kilometers (about 38 miles) from the city of Sfax. The cabinet also resolved to develop a regional plan for recycling and waste recovery within three to five years.

For Hentati, postponing the general strike was a mistake because pressure that should have served to obtain guarantees from authorities dissipated. The government quickly came up with a package of urgent measures to solve the crisis to avert the labor action. Though, he said, “It did not make any real commitment.” He added residents in the city of Sfax have been left in a disarray, as they are cautiously watching the government’s decisions.

The environmental activist made clear the issue is fundamentally a structural one. 

“Today, the garbage crisis in Sfax shows the limits of the long-applied waste treatment system, which only bypasses the problem without resolving it,” Hentati said.

Increasing numbers of local people are demanding the government introduce waste disposal policies that will protect their right to a safe environment because they refuse to allow their neighborhoods to be turned into landfills.

Poor responsibility sharing between the state and regional and local institutions have resulted in a deadlock in the handling of the ongoing crisis: The central government expects municipal councils to provide much of the waste management, while municipalities call on the state to find sustainable solutions.

Trust In the Dumps

Given their proximity to citizens, local governments are the first bodies held responsible for failing to effectively deal with waste treatment. Yet, it should be noted Tunisia’s elected local councils, which have been operating since 2018, “face severe budgetary and human capital constraints,” as Lana Salman, researcher in urban governance and international development, wrote in a research paper published in April. “[It] is a highly lucrative sector where opacity and corruption are not only endemic, but also institutionalized,” she penned.

While municipalities are responsible for hauling garbage to temporary transfer centers with the ANGED’s assistance, the agency is in charge of transporting waste to the final destination at sanitary landfills and managing such landfills.

Kallel specified greater efforts are needed to raise environmental awareness among the concerned institutions as well as among people, and that an adequate budget should be allocated to make possible feasible solutions. “Rather than shifting the responsibility from one to another, if everyone is involved responsibly through the whole waste management chain, the crisis will be overcome,” he said, underscoring the important role citizens can play in contributing to environmental protection.

The specialist maintained that trust in state institutions needs to be restored, after years of unfulfilled promises. “If the state engages by taking serious gradual steps, the average citizen will be confident that a real solution to this crisis will come,” Kallel said. “Else, it will persist.”

Kchaou similarly referred to lack of public trust as a critical matter, blaming the country’s successive governments for appointing incompetent people to ministerial posts over the past decade. She contended people will hardly act in respect of environmental protection as long as they see the relevant government structures—local, regional and national—not providing waste treatment.

Long-standing dysfunctional governance and corruption within Tunisia’s state administration underlie the garbage emergency in the Sfax province. More than half of the country’s landfill sites have reached their maximum capacity, threatening the environment and human health.

The state neglect mirrors the lack of national strategy to develop recycling capacity to deal with solid waste in Tunisia. The Ministry of the Environment has opposed the closure of dumps as no alternatives exist. In October, the new environment minister, Leila Chikhaoui, said while visiting the city of Sfax that no immediate solutions were available in the governorate.

Raouia Amira, head of the sanitation, health and environmental committee in the municipality of Sfax, pointed to the country’s solid waste management strategy being discontinued in 2016. “We need a national strategy,” Amira told Toward Freedom. “To that end, the state needs to put in place a communication campaign and spare no expense.”

She thinks incineration is the most realistic approach to treating household waste in the Sfax governorate. Tunisia has long suffered waste management problems, with an estimated 2.5 million tonnes of rubbish produced annually, 63% of which is organic, and most of it buried in landfills without being processed, recycled or incinerated.

Sustainable Solutions

The thorny matter is aggravated by lack of investment in sustainable solutions and endemic corruption within the sector in the North African country.

In a press conference in 2014, lawyer Faouzia Bacha Amdouni presented findings of an independent audit revealing “colossal funds” intended for environmental projects were channeled through the Ministry of Environment and its agencies, ending up in the hands of the government of Prime Minister Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (1987-2011) and its allies. The advocate declared several figures within the agencies were working to conceal their involvement in corruption as well as their plan not to design new strategies. “The department of the environment itself was created in 2005, not to develop policies and innovative projects for waste treatment or sanitation stations, but to receive resources from international donors and invest them in personal projects benefiting the clans in power and their relatives,” she said at the press conference. Some of those international donors reportedly include the European Investment Bank, the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation, the World Bank and the French Development Agency. 

In July 2020, then-Prime Minister Elyes Fakhfakh resigned following allegations of corrupt links to the waste industry. In December 2020, the environment minister was dismissed and arrested along with 23 other officials—including members of the ANGED, or National Waste Management Agency—for being linked to a scandal involving the illegal transfer from Naples, Italy, to the Tunisian port of Sousse of more than 200 shipping containers packed full of decaying household and medical waste disguised as post-industrial plastic waste. The Italian and Tunisian companies embroiled had signed a contract worth €5 million ($5.76 million) to dispose of 120,000 tons of Italian waste in Tunisian landfills.

An investigation published by Inkyfada last March revealed a vast network of corruption involving Italian waste.

The critical environmental situation in Sfax governorate poses a clear social challenge for President Kais Saied, who promised to close the El Gonna landfill during his 2019 presidential campaign. This came in a region that strongly supported his July 25 power seizure, in what his critics have called a coup.

The mobilizations against the re-opening of the toxic dump and the wider trash crisis in Sfax demonstrates Tunisian citizens’ yearning for a clean and sustainable environment. This, as they escalate their calls on the government to stop imposing short-sighted decisions without popular consent and demand it find alternatives to landfill sites.

“The extent of the garbage crisis we’ve experienced in Sfax has been of some use,” the artist Kchaou remarked. “If that didn’t happen, no one would be taking the issue seriously.”

Alessandra Bajec is a freelance journalist specializing in West Asia and North Africa. Between 2010 and 2011, she lived in Palestine. She was based in Cairo from 2013 to 2017, and since 2018 has been based in Tunis.