Tunisia wants to be developed, but it cannot answer one basic question: who lives where?

We have street names. House numbers. National ID cards. And still we treat the address as decorative, printed on the card, then left to rot. You can move from Ettadhamoun to La Marsa, from Kasserine to Sfax. The system barely blinks. Almost nothing depends on a living address. What follows you is not where you are. It is where you come from. Birthplace. Family place. The neighbourhood that stamped you at 18. Your ID does not say, here is where to find me. It says, here is which box I belong to. That is not an address system. It is an administrative caste system with better stationery.

The state sees clearly only when a bill is due. Every electrified home has a STEG contract. Every running tap has a SONEDE bill. The postman is the real link between state and address. He finds the meter, delivers the notice, comes back to collect. But notice what this relationship recognizes. Not the citizen. The obligation. It is state-to-meter, not state-to-person. The contract sticks to the owner. The humans inside pass through like ghosts, especially if they rent. In serious countries, moving triggers one boring ritual. Register the new address and services follow. The meter is hardware. The account is human. Here, the number lives forever. The people are incidental.

Without a live link between person, place, and account, your life never accumulates.

You lose continuity. Pay rent for years. Repay debts. Work steadily. Then arrive at a counter like you were invented that morning.
You lose protection. An employer fires you off the record. A landlord plays games. Before you can claim a right, you must prove you existed in that relationship. Without shared records, you are just a story. Stories are cheap.
You lose mobility. Every move is a reset. New municipality. New paperwork. New favours. New “I know a guy.”

Scale that up and whole neighbourhoods become politically weightless. A quarter that is not registered cannot negotiate with facts. Population. Growth. Needs. It appears as a grey smudge in a PowerPoint. Problem area. Easy to ignore. Convenient to blame. Then comes the excuse: you cannot address popular neighbourhoods because things change too fast. Yes. When you refuse to map and service a place, it evolves chaotically. That is not an argument against addressing. It is the invoice for not addressing twenty years earlier.

The economics are predictable. You cannot tax what you cannot see. The formal sector carries the burden, then lobbies to keep the fog. You cannot price risk. Banks treat poor addresses as radioactive and default to no. Every hour queuing for stamps, moving cash across town because you lack a usable account, is an hour producing nothing. Individually, just life. Collectively, a hidden tax on everything. The state, blind by design, does policy on guesswork. How do you plan schools, clinics, transport, jobs, if half the population is statistical haze? You do not. You improvise. You write strategies for a country you cannot see.

Other countries did this work. India. Estonia. Rwanda. Not because it is glamorous. Because it pays. Tunisia is not exceptional. We are late. We have 12 million people. Engineers. GPS. Smartphones. Utility contracts. ID cards. What we lack is the political decision to stop improvising.

Some worry visibility is dangerous. A gift to the next authoritarian. But let us be honest. Under Ben Ali, the regime found whoever it wanted. The mukhabarat did not need a modern address registry to knock on the right door. Authoritarian surveillance runs on informants, not databases. The current opacity does not protect citizens from abuse. It only locks them out of services. That is not a tradeoff. It is the worst of both arrangements. The safeguard is not staying invisible. It is building oversight, penalties, and public rules that make legibility work for citizens, not just for power.

We love the big words. Development. Investment. Reform. We love Vision 2030 slides with arrows going up. But if a country cannot know who lives where and connect that to how people earn, pay, and claim rights, it is not developing. It is dodging the homework. Then wondering why it keeps failing the exam.