Press Release
Tunis the Capital without Water for Five Days:
Has the Privatization of the Water Company Begun?
(Translated)

In a dangerous precedent, drinking water has been cut off from large parts of Tunis. This has disrupted family life, disrupted the interests and work of hundreds of thousands of people and has made life more difficult.

Since we live in a failed state that has entrusted its sovereign decisions to the experts of international banks, then we have the right to ask:

Are the technical excuses behind which the government and the officials of the Water Company hide behind enough for this long unprecedented interruption? Or is it about deliberately showing this level of weakness and degradation in the performance of the water company, so that it is an introduction to convince the public to neglect it, by adopting a policy of "partnership between the Public and Private sectors" or the "Privatization" in the proceedings of Water Resources?

The World Bank has been funding the activities of the Disinfection Office in Northern Tunisia since 2010, which has called for public-private partnership in water projects in Tunisia since 2014, and it is the World Bank itself that has forced many countries to privatize the water sector as a necessary condition to provide loans.

The life of society is dependent on Water Resources and its disposition is a sovereign order. It is not permissible, either legitimately or intellectually, to attribute the Water Resource to the whales of money, controlling it in the lives of people. The provision of water and the guarantee of its delivery to the people must be the country's top priority.

Its distribution should be given financial and technical care so as to ensure that it is provided to each individual as a right, not as a commodity that is sold and bought as is the capitalist view. But we are in a "state" whose decisions rest with the colonial imperialist circles that demand and even push for the State to give up the distribution of potable water, in which is life for the people, for the benefit of capitalists.

Therefore, in order to prevent the repetition of people’s suffering as happened in the Capital in recent days, we need a real State, whose decision is in its own hands, who governs by the laws of Allah (swt), and whose leader does not sleep while some people are thirsty and cannot access water.

Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir
in Wilayah Tunisia