This happened less than two months after the decision to imprison additional employees who had been using forged school records, which reopened the discussion about the widespread use of forged scientific credentials over the past ten years to obtain government jobs in the fields of education, business, health, and other areas.
The head of the Anti-Corruption Association, Ibrahim Al-Misawi, asserted in statements to Sky News Arabia that the occurrence of shady assignments with forged credentials is due to favouritism based on political affiliation and the passing of positions within a number of state institutions and ministries.
El-Misawy emphasised that maintaining compatibility with the Ennahda movement of the Brotherhood and the social peace system, whose costs were exorbitant in the previous ten years for the Tunisian state, cost money. He pointed out that after the agreement between the late President Beji Caid Essebsi and the leader of the Ennahda movement Rached Ghannouchi was announced, corruption involving academic degrees began to surface. There are hundreds of dubious appointments established using forged certificates in the ministries of finance, health, education, customs, and public banks.
Al-Misawi believed that all recent efforts to find corruption records in public offices had failed, that investigations had stagnated, and that there was a confrontation between the corrupt system and anti-corruption initiatives.
The head of the Anti-Corruption Association also noted that there are very few instances of phoney scientific certificates that have been brought to the attention of the judiciary and that the problem grew “more insolent” during the Renaissance movement’s rule during the dark decade, which caused the public office to collapse and overcrowd it with new hires who number more than 217,000.
In a short period of time, it increased to 800,000 in the public sector, which influenced institutions’ failure to meet their responsibilities and eventual insolvency.
The National Association of University Graduates’ secretary general, Muhammad Al-Faridhi, for his part, described the issue of certificate fraud as prevalent and claimed that it frequently occurs in political contexts before being closed owing to insufficient investigations. Additionally, he mentioned that they had approached the judicial branch with a request to serve as a monitoring party for investigations into instances of scientific certificate fraud.
A member of the Basic Education Syndicate named Tawfiq El-Shabbi revealed that numerous teachers had not been employed and were being looked into in relation to falsified scientific credentials. In order to return the right to its owners and penalise individuals culpable for the forgeries, he said, financial and administrative inspectors had been despatched to review their files.
Al-Shabbi went on to state that they refute any assertions of forgery and fraud and that they have no proof of any involvement on the side of union parties in the issuance of fake credentials or the appointment of people to positions that are unrelated to their academic qualifications.
Private personnel using fraudulent credentials. Another manifestation of the Ennahda movement’s corruption
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