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Unemployment and expensive life in Maghreb.

Confrontations occurred in Algeria, in Morocco and in Tunisia, where the population started to despair of the economic context.

Strikes and riots followed one another. The unemployment rate is % in Morocco, 14% in Tunisia, and 18% in Algeria. The social situation is tense; the strikes also touch the public offices. Let’s point that riots are related to difficult life conditions in poorer areas: unemployment, but also difficulty in finding housing, assumed or unconscious corruption, etc. The young people of the poor areas, whose life is very difficult, plundered stores and destroyed cars. The government pains to improve the living conditions of Algerian, despite oil revenues record: 81 billion dollars envisaged in 2008.

For a job, there are more than 300 requests, specifies a person in charge of a company in Algiers. There is a real fracture between the leaders and the citizens in the Maghreb.

Is the Union for the Mediterranean project an answer? Let’s hope it because the problems in Maghreb (or Black Africa) put an immigration pressure that Europe wants to contain and limit.

These countries show an economic fracture with Europe but also suffer also from a fracture within the population between the poor and the rich. The change must come from mentalities:

- Our mentality: because we cannot close the European borders to  immigration and buy all our products in China instead of giving incomes to the Maghreb by investing or by buying at our Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian neighbors who are more and more often also our cousins or our neighbors’ ones!

- Their mentality: because one day, it will be necessary to adopt social, economic, and tax measures etc… supporting the redistribution of the incomes or at least the accession to jobs and to a correct standard of living.

Jean Samper

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