Tebboune's gift to the Algerian army generals

From 2015 to 2021, Algeria will have spent 35 billion US dollars on armaments. That is an annual average of $5.8 billion. This is a huge sum for a country where the population queues endlessly for basic necessities such as milk, oil, semolina, beans, lentils, etc. A country where endemic unemployment affects all social strata due to the lack of job creation projects. 

Since his appointment (not election) by the army to the supreme magistracy, Abdelmadjid Tebboune and his propagandists have been insisting that the new Algeria will be different from the old one. They keep promising better days for a country that is sinking deeper and deeper into impoverishment without the slightest glimmer of hope, despite the billions of dollars reaped from record oil and gas prices.

Unfortunately for Algerians, these price rises are of little benefit to them. To the astonishment of observers of the Algerian scene, it is the army that benefits. And how. At the end of his mandate, Abdelmadjid Tebboune has increased the arms budget for 2023 to 18 billion US dollars, up from 9 billion the previous year. An amount that astounds everyone except the members of a shoddy parliament who vote in favour of all laws without the slightest reservation. 

Not content with this gift of 18 billion, President Tebboune is offering a record budget of 21.6 billion US dollars for his last year. This is what has led some analysts to claim that only corruption can justify such a budget. It is well known that the arms trade generates substantial bribes. Algerian generals used by the late Bouteflika to share some of the oil revenues benefit from this. With Tebboune, they have become more demanding and more voracious. You don't have to be a genius to realise that the bigger the arms budget, the bigger the 'tchippa' (as Algerians call bribes)," confesses an insider familiar with the ins and outs of Algerian power. 

With a budget of $21.6 billion, the army takes the lion's share of the 2024 finance bill, ahead of vital sectors such as education, health, agriculture, industry and so on. No country in Africa can afford to spend so much on armaments, even in times of war. "It's staggering," says a former senior official. 

In two years, the Algerian army has received 39.6 billion dollars for its armaments. That is, 4.6 billion more than it had been allocated in six years (between 2015 and 2021). However, there is no justification for this excess. Algeria is not at war. It is not the few terrorist groups roaming the Sahel region that we are going to fight with such expensive war materiel. Terrorist groups that direct their actions against Mali, which receives no military aid from the Algerian regime. Only the Polisario takes advantage of this colossal budget to launch attacks against Morocco in order to provoke a military response. These provocations are doomed to fail and are likely to backfire in the very near future. The classification of the Polisario as a "terrorist organisation" by international bodies, in response to its latest attacks against civilians in the Smara region, would undoubtedly spell its end.