Tunisia, a small North African nation, has had a lot of bad press of late. This comes on the back of a campaign against immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa, with reports rife of random identity checks and violent arrests, sometimes leaving children stranded as their parents are driven away.

The violence was sparked when the country’s President, Kais Said, said on February 21 that sub-Saharan African immigrants were “a source of crime and delinquency”. More alarmingly, he added: “The undeclared goal of the successive waves of illegal immigration is to consider Tunisia a purely African country that has no affiliation to the Arab and Islamic nations.”

Needless to say, he did not provide any shred of evidence for these incendiary remarks. Thankfully, such recklessness was enough to rouse the suits at the Africa Union (AU) headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, out of their hibernation. The head of the pan- African body’s commission, Moussa Faki, summoned Tunisia’s AU representative to register his “deep shock and concern at the form and substance” of Said’s utterances.

I try to not name and shame individuals whose behaviour is such that they qualify to be called mamparas – Southern African slang for a fool or a buffoon. The only person to have been named the Africa Beat Mampara is Michael O’Leary, the fellow who runs Irish low-cost airline RyanAir, for requiring South African passport holders to demonstrate proficiency in Afrikaans as a condition for being allowed to board the airline’s planes. Only a mampara can do that, considering that only about 13% of South Africans are mother-tongue Afrikaans speakers. The Tunisian President’s utterances, I reckon, are way worse than O’Leary’s theatrics. He therefore becomes our second Africa Beat Mampara.

One thing about mamparas is that they back off when called out. O’Leary, for example, quickly abandoned his little plan to introduce a pre-embarkment Afrikaans test for South African travellers after much backlash from the South African government and citizens from all walks of life. Similarly, our newly coined mampara has had to eat humble pie, saying on March 6 that law enforcement officers found to have harassed immigrants – legal or illegal – would be dealt with harshly and that visa rules would be relaxed for Africans to allow for stays of up to six months instead of three, and of a year for students.

It’s a mystery why Said would say the outrageous things he said about African immigrants in Tunisia. Officially, there are only about 21 000 of them, although the actual number is said to be between 30 000 and 50 000. In a country of about 12-million people, that’s a drop in the ocean, and it’s inconceivable that they will change the make-up of the Tunisian population so that the country loses its Arab and Muslim character.

It’s not only his great-replacement-theory- evoking speech on February 21 that has earned Said notoriety in recent times. Having come to power in 2019 – in a country that was the first blossom of the Arab Spring back in 2011 – he started consolidating power barely two years later, when he dismissed the Prime Minister, suspended Parliament and crafted laws that enable him to rule by decree. He went a step further in 2022, when he replaced a post-Arab Spring Constitution, which came into force in 2014, with one that gives him the ultimate authority to make judicial appointments. Then followed mass dismissals of judges and prosecutors, ostensibly as part of an anticorruption campaign. At this rate, Tunisia could be on the road to One Man rule – just when we thought Big Man-ism in Africa was on its way out. One hopes that the AU will not get back to its slumber but keep a watchful eye on this mampara from North Africa.