LOCAL lore holds that seven visits to Kairouan’s imposing grand mosque are equal to the haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that is one of the “pillars of Islam”. The city has been a centre of Sunni scholarship for centuries. Lately, though, it has acquired another landmark: the “road of death”, a rutted highway that slices south-west into the desert. The transport ministry promised to fix it in 2016 after 27 people died in wrecks the previous year. Yet the moniker still fits. On April 18th a pregnant woman was seriously hurt in a crash. She might have lived if the local hospital used paramedics qualified to operate the ambulance. Instead, she died hours later.
Since their revolution in 2011, Tunisians have been stuck with unelected local governments that do little to fix up highways and hospitals. That is meant to change on May 6th, when voters choose municipal councils for the first time. The elections, originally...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa https://ift.tt/2JQcZ2K
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