For five years, Tunisia has moved from one shortage and public-service crisis to another. Sugar, cooking oil, milk, flour, semolina, rice, coffee, medicine, fuel and meat have all, at different times, become difficult to obtain or significantly more expensive. In the summer of 2026, the list has grown to include bottled water, drinking water and electricity. Each crisis has its own immediate explanation, but their repetition points to a deeper concern: a state that too often appears to intervene only after a problem has already reached the population.
The latest difficulties have emerged during an intense summer heatwave, when temperatures have placed exceptional pressure on Tunisia’s electricity system and pushed demand for bottled water sharply higher. Consumers have faced queues and shortages in search of mineral water, while electricity interruptions have increased and some households have experienced prolonged interruptions to their water supply. In parts of Greater Tunis, taps have remained dry for hours and, in some cases, even longer.
There is no question that extreme weather has aggravated the situation. A heatwave naturally increases electricity consumption as households and businesses rely more heavily on cooling systems. High temperatures can also intensify demand for drinking water, particularly bottled water. But these circumstances do not fully explain what Tunisia is experiencing. The current difficulties are not isolated events; they are the latest episodes in a sequence of crises that have accumulated over several years.
A recent compilation by the Tunisian news site Al Qatiba brought many of those crises together in a single infographic. The chronology is striking. During 2021 and 2022, shortages affected sugar, cooking oil, flour and rice. Milk, coffee, butter and fuel subsequently became major concerns. Meat prices later reached extremely high levels, while medicines were repeatedly unavailable in pharmacies. Now, in 2026, bottled water, drinking water and electricity have joined the list.
Each episode generated its own headlines before attention shifted to the next emergency. Considered individually, the crises can be explained through different combinations of economic, climatic, international and administrative factors. But when they are examined collectively, another question becomes unavoidable: why does the state repeatedly appear to respond after shortages have become visible to consumers rather than acting while the warning signs are still clear?
Different Crises, the Same Failure of Anticipation
It would be misleading to suggest that every crisis has the same origin. Kaïs Saïed cannot personally be held responsible for drought, the war in Ukraine, international commodity-price increases or an exceptional heatwave. Tunisia also inherited ageing infrastructure, financially troubled public enterprises and structural weaknesses in several economic sectors from governments that preceded him.
Those realities matter. Yet acknowledging them does not remove the responsibility of the government to anticipate foreseeable risks. A government may not be able to prevent every external shock, but it can prepare for the consequences of those shocks. That distinction is central to the question now facing Tunisia.
The dairy sector provides a particularly clear illustration. The country’s milk industry did not suddenly deteriorate in 2026. The sector has reportedly been weakening since 2016 and has lost approximately 30 percent of its livestock. Tunisia once produced a surplus estimated at between 60 million and 70 million litres and was able to export part of that production. Over time, however, the country moved from surplus production to dependence on imported powdered milk.
The warning signs were therefore available long before the latest shortages. According to the Tunisian Union of Agriculture and Fisheries, six ministerial councils were dedicated to the dairy sector between 2020 and 2024. A programme intended to replenish livestock numbers was also funded but had not been implemented, according to the agricultural organisation. The issue is not whether a government can instantly reverse years of deterioration. It is whether action was taken early enough to prevent a predictable decline from becoming a supply crisis.
The pharmaceutical sector presents a different set of problems but raises the same question about preparedness. The Central Pharmacy of Tunisia has faced heavy debts to foreign laboratories, while difficulties in obtaining foreign currency have complicated the importation of medicines. Several international pharmaceutical groups have also withdrawn from the Tunisian market. These financial and supply pressures eventually affect the people who depend on pharmacies for essential treatment.
In July, the Central Pharmacy revised the prices of 306 medicines. A comparative analysis by the Rassd platform, using the new Central Pharmacy price list, identified ten increases of more than 100 percent among a sample of 29 products. Basdene, for example, rose from 0.762 dinars to five dinars, representing an increase of 556 percent. The significance of the figures goes beyond the price of an individual medicine. They demonstrate how financial difficulties, import constraints and supply pressures can eventually become problems experienced directly by patients.
Electricity reveals another version of the same vulnerability. The 2026 heatwave did not create the weaknesses in Tunisia’s electricity network; it exposed them under exceptional pressure. As temperatures rose and electricity consumption surged, production capacity and investment proved insufficient to absorb the increased demand comfortably.
The impact extended beyond electricity itself. Water distribution depends heavily on electricity because pumping stations require power to move water through the network. On July 14 and 15, SONEDE pumping stations recorded between 700 and 1,000 electricity outages per day, according to Mounir Dridi, regional director of operations and distribution for Greater Tunis.
That figure demonstrates how interconnected Tunisia’s public-service crises have become. Electricity interruptions can shut down pumping stations. Pumping failures can disrupt water distribution. Water shortages can cause consumers to turn more heavily towards bottled water. At the same time, increased demand for bottled water places additional pressure on production and distribution systems that are themselves dependent on reliable electricity.
The immediate causes therefore differ from one crisis to another. Yet the underlying pattern remains remarkably similar: warning signs emerge, structural weaknesses persist, investment or reform is delayed, pressure builds and the government eventually responds once the consequences are already being felt by the population.
That process may attract less attention than allegations of conspiracy or sabotage. But it may be considerably more important when the objective is to prevent the next crisis.
Always Looking for a Culprit
Tunisia’s response to shortages has also developed a familiar political language. When essential food products disappear from shops, President Kaïs Saïed frequently directs attention towards speculators, monopolists and smugglers. When bottled water becomes difficult to find, official explanations initially focus on an artificial crisis and speculative behaviour. When water and electricity disruptions intensify, the rhetoric can become even more serious, with the president alleging that some interruptions were deliberately engineered to fuel the situation.
Speculation and smuggling are real problems. Authorities have carried out seizures connected to illegal activity, and Tunisia’s coffee market provides an important example of the scale of parallel distribution. At the end of 2025, professionals estimated that nearly 60 percent of coffee circulating in Tunisia came through parallel channels, according to Wafa Attaoui, vice-president of the professional group representing coffee roasters under Conect.
Such activity can distort formal markets, interfere with supply chains and contribute to shortages. It would therefore be wrong to dismiss the role of illegal distribution networks. But the existence of speculation and smuggling cannot provide a complete explanation for every structural weakness confronting Tunisia.
Speculators did not eliminate approximately 30 percent of the country’s livestock. They did not create the Central Pharmacy’s accumulated debts to foreign laboratories. They cannot build the electricity-generation capacity Tunisia requires, nor can they repair ageing water infrastructure. More importantly, they cannot by themselves explain why shortages have appeared repeatedly across sectors as different as food, medicine, water and energy.
The bottled-water crisis makes that distinction particularly clear. At the end of July, the administration was still describing the shortage as an artificial crisis. Later, however, the Ministry of Commerce acknowledged that demand had reached roughly ten times its normal level. Stocks that were expected to last until the end of August had reportedly been exhausted by the middle of July, while production lines were also affected by electricity interruptions.
The resulting crisis cannot reasonably be reduced to one explanation. Extraordinary demand, depleted stocks, production difficulties and electricity disruptions were occurring at the same time. A government seeking to understand the problem therefore needs to examine the entire chain rather than focus exclusively on those who may have exploited shortages.
The same principle applies to the water and electricity disruptions. Kaïs Saïed said investigations had uncovered deliberate acts intended to worsen the situation. If criminal activity or sabotage occurred, those responsible should certainly be identified and prosecuted. But allegations of deliberate disruption cannot remove the need to examine the ordinary weaknesses that make infrastructure vulnerable in the first place.
Engineers and officials associated with STEG and SONEDE have pointed to more conventional factors, including insufficient capacity, delayed investment, faulty pipes, pumping stations affected by electricity failures and exceptionally high consumption. These explanations may be less politically dramatic than sabotage. They may nevertheless be more useful in determining what must be done to prevent another crisis.
The fundamental issue is therefore not whether Tunisia should investigate speculation, smuggling or sabotage. It should when evidence exists. The issue is whether those explanations are sometimes being used to avoid examining failures that fall directly within the responsibility of the state.
A resilient state must do both. It must identify those who exploit weaknesses while simultaneously eliminating the weaknesses that allow those problems to become so damaging.
Five Years After July 25, 2021
Supporters of Kaïs Saïed can legitimately argue that he inherited a country burdened by serious structural problems. SONEDE’s infrastructure did not become ageing infrastructure in 2021. Public enterprises had already experienced years of financial and operational difficulties. The dairy sector was already deteriorating, while previous governments had failed to resolve several of the weaknesses that are now producing consequences.
Responsibility for Tunisia’s accumulated problems therefore does not begin with Saïed. The governments of the previous decade have their own share of responsibility for the condition in which the country entered his presidency.
But five years is a significant period in politics. Five years after July 25, 2021, responsibility can no longer be explained entirely by pointing backwards.
Saïed’s political project was built around the argument that the previous system had failed to govern effectively. His intervention on July 25 was presented as a break with a political order that he regarded as incapable of solving the country’s problems. Since then, executive authority has become increasingly concentrated around the presidency. The Constitution has been changed, governments have been selected within a much more centralised presidential system, and decision-making has become substantially more vertical.
That concentration of power produces an unavoidable consequence: concentration of responsibility.
A president cannot claim greater authority when decisions succeed while indefinitely attributing failures to predecessors, ministers, public companies, speculators or unnamed saboteurs when things go wrong. The more power is concentrated at the top of the political system, the more difficult it becomes to separate the person occupying that position from the performance of the system he leads.
This does not mean that every shortage is personally caused by Kaïs Saïed. It means that after five years, his government must increasingly be judged by what it has done with the authority it accumulated.
The inherited problems are real. So are the problems that have emerged or persisted during the subsequent five years. The question for Tunisia is therefore becoming more direct: has political centralisation strengthened the state’s capacity to anticipate crises, or has it simply produced a system that reacts more decisively once crises have already arrived?
To Govern Is to Foresee
In a recent editorial in Le Maghreb, Zied Krichen recalled the famous formulation attributed to Émile de Girardin: “To govern is to foresee; and to foresee nothing is to rush to one’s ruin.”
The phrase dates from 1849, but its relevance to Tunisia in 2026 is difficult to ignore. Governing does not mean controlling the weather, preventing international conflicts or eliminating every act of speculation. It means understanding how foreseeable risks can affect the country and preparing before those risks become emergencies.
If livestock numbers are falling, intervention has to begin before milk becomes scarce. If the Central Pharmacy is accumulating debts and struggling with imports, solutions have to be developed before medicines become unavailable or unaffordable. If electricity-generation capacity is struggling to keep pace with demand, investment must happen before extreme temperatures push the system beyond its limits. If water networks are ageing, maintenance and rehabilitation must come before households turn on their taps and discover that nothing is coming out.
This is the difference between governing and merely reacting.
A government cannot prevent every crisis. A drought can occur despite careful planning. An international war can disrupt commodity markets. An extraordinary heatwave can place unprecedented pressure on infrastructure. Even a well-prepared state can be confronted by circumstances it could not completely anticipate.
But repeated crises across multiple essential sectors require a different kind of explanation. When food products, medicines and basic public utilities repeatedly experience shortages or disruptions over five years, the accumulation itself becomes politically significant.
The issue is not whether every failure can be blamed on the presidency. The issue is whether the presidency has done enough to ensure that known vulnerabilities do not repeatedly become emergencies.
For ordinary Tunisians, the consequences are not abstract. They are measured in families searching for milk, patients looking for medicines, consumers facing higher prices, households waiting for water and citizens enduring electricity interruptions during extreme heat. These are failures experienced directly by the population rather than theoretical weaknesses discussed in government offices.
Speculation, smuggling, sabotage and international shocks may all contribute to individual crises. None, however, can replace the basic responsibility of the state to prepare for foreseeable difficulties.
After five years, the argument that Tunisia is simply suffering from the inheritance of previous governments is becoming increasingly insufficient. So too is the explanation that every shortage is caused by speculators, every malfunction by incompetent officials and every suspicious interruption by forces seeking to destabilise the country.
A political system that concentrates power must also accept concentrated accountability.
Ultimately, the real test of governance is not how convincingly leaders explain a crisis once it has happened. It is whether they recognised the warning signs before the crisis arrived.
Tunisia’s recent experience suggests that too many warnings have been allowed to become emergencies. Declining livestock numbers became milk shortages. Financial and supply problems became medicine concerns. Insufficient electricity capacity became widespread disruption under extreme heat. Fragile water infrastructure became a crisis when electricity failures and exceptional demand placed additional pressure on the system.
The causes are different. The responsibility to anticipate them is not.
To govern is to foresee.
When the state waits until milk, medicine, water or electricity has already become scarce before responding, it is no longer preventing the crisis. It is managing its consequences.
For a country that has spent five years moving from one emergency to another, the most important question is therefore no longer simply what caused the latest shortage. The deeper question is why the next one was not anticipated.
Because if governance means acting only after the damage has become visible, Tunisia is facing something larger than a succession of individual crises.
It is confronting a crisis of governance itself.
