TUNIS — Two days after President Kaïs Saïed made an unannounced night-time visit to Gabès, the presidency announced that industrial units in the governorate would be dismantled "according to a clear strategy." The statement, issued after a Wednesday meeting at Carthage Palace and relayed by the state news agency TAP on Thursday morning, named neither the installations concerned nor a date.

The president received the health minister, Mustapha Ferjani; the minister of equipment and housing, Salah Zouari, who is also acting head of the industry, mines and energy portfolio; and the social affairs minister, Issam Lahmar. According to the communiqué, Mr. Saïed said that public establishments and enterprises would continue to operate, and that the units in question would be taken apart in an orderly fashion.

What the statement does and does not say

The paragraph on dismantling follows directly on a passage about the Gabès visit, where the president was quoted as saying that "the environment has been assassinated." That sequence ties the announcement to the Tunisian Chemical Group complex on the Gabès coast — the source of the phosphogypsum discharged into the Gulf — without the presidency ever naming the company.

The scope is also narrower than it first appears. During the 10 August visit, Mr. Saïed spoke of dismantling units that had become obsolete or were no longer in working order, and said the operation could take several years. He distinguished those from units that had been repaired in order to stop polluting emissions. In other words, no announcement has been made about closing the complex as a whole.

Three things are missing from the public record: a list of the units, a calendar, and a cost. Without them, the announcement cannot be audited by anyone outside the executive — which is precisely the gap that has made previous pledges on Gabès difficult to follow. Local campaigners have been asking for a schedule since well before this week.

Corruption framing, and the response from Gabès

At the same meeting, the president presented the dismantling of corruption networks as a precondition for meeting regional demands, accusing those networks of stoking tension through fires, water and electricity cuts, and obstruction of administrative services. The communiqué offered no specific evidence for those accusations, and named no individuals or cases.

The Stop Pollution collective in Gabès has reiterated its own demand: the dismantling of all polluting units, not a subset chosen by the government. Activists quoted in Tunisian outlets after the visit argued that units described as repaired are still emitting, and that only an independent measurement regime would settle the question.

What would make the pledge verifiable

The proposals now on the table come from the campaigners rather than the state: publish the list of units and the sequence in which they will be taken down; publish continuous, independently audited air and seawater readings; and pair any closure with a redeployment plan for the workforce, since the complex is among the region's largest employers. The presidency, for its part, has committed publicly to keeping public enterprises running — a commitment that will be tested by whichever list it eventually publishes.