TUNIS — The Ministry of Agriculture, Water Resources and Fisheries has told parliament that the revised draft Water Code now meets the conditions for presentation to the Council of Ministers "in the shortest possible time." It did not say when that meeting would take place.

The statement came in a written reply to Aouatif Cheniti, the MP for the Teboursouk–Dougga–Tibar and Béja Sud constituency, who filed her question on 13 April 2026 asking why the text had been delayed and what timetable was planned for sending it to the Assembly of the Representatives of the People.

According to the ministry, an amended version of the code was transmitted to the competent services on 30 June 2026. It incorporates observations submitted by the various ministries and bodies consulted, and is accompanied by three documents: a detailed table answering each of those observations, a first draft of the implementing texts that must accompany the code, and a note setting out the new provisions and what the ministry describes as the text's reforming character.

A file measured in years, not months

The 30 June transmission is the latest step in a process that predates the current parliament. A bill to issue a Water Code was registered in the legislature as far back as 2019 and never adopted. Under the current institutional arrangement, the draft was submitted to a restricted Council of Ministers on 25 February 2025. At the end of that meeting the Agriculture Ministry and the legal adviser's office at the Presidency of the Government were tasked with reworking the text in the light of the proposals made, with instructions to accelerate its finalisation.

The Agriculture Minister recounted that same sequence to deputies during a plenary session devoted to oral questions on 11 March 2025. Seventeen months later, the ministry's answer to Ms Cheniti describes the file as ready but still un-tabled.

The bottleneck is not parliamentary. Under the procedure, the code cannot reach the Assembly until the Council of Ministers examines and approves it. The ministry's reply confirms the text has cleared the inter-ministerial consultation stage; what it does not supply is the one thing the MP asked for, a date.

Why the delay is not procedural trivia

The code being redrafted is the framework that would govern how water is extracted, allocated, managed and protected. It is being finalised during a summer in which SONEDE has imposed night-time water rationing in the Sahel, in which cuts to water supply have followed power cuts in several governorates, and in which parliament has held a plenary session specifically on repeated water and electricity interruptions. The legal architecture for managing scarcity is, in other words, being revised in the middle of the scarcity it is meant to manage.

The reform has also been publicly contested. Civil-society organisations, among them the Tunis office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, published critical readings of earlier drafts, and reporting on the current version has focused on provisions allowing the declaration of a state of water emergency and the creation of a dedicated force to record water offences. Those provisions have not been published in final form, which is part of the difficulty: the public debate is running on versions that may no longer be the operative text.

What is being asked

The immediate demand on the table is Ms Cheniti's, and it is modest: a calendar. Publishing the date of the Council of Ministers session, and the amended text alongside its implementing decrees, would let deputies, water users' associations and specialists examine the same document rather than competing versions of it.

Beyond that, the ministry's own framing offers the clearest test. It says the amended draft answers the observations raised against it and is ready to be tabled. If that is accurate, the file's remaining delay is a scheduling decision rather than a technical one — and it is now measured against a season in which Tunisians are being asked to accept rationing under a legal framework the state itself has spent seven years trying to replace.