Free credit, paid for by the banks: is decree 148 a bad idea, or an unfinished one?
Decree no. 2026-148 of 23 July, published in the official gazette on 24 July, obliges every bank to set aside at least 8% of the previous year's profit (put at roughly 120 to 129 million dinars of 2025 earnings) for loans carrying no interest, no guarantee and no file fee: up to 5,000 dinars for individuals, 10,000 for micro-project holders and 25,000 for small firms and community companies, repayable over two years. Two weeks on, banks are still not taking applications (the banking-law specialist Mohamed Nakhli estimates the first loans will be disbursed in early September) the central bank has issued no circular and has not mentioned the scheme at all while holding its policy rate at 7%, and the Tunindex fell 3.16% on 28 July, tripping a trading halt. Since then Tunisian economists, commentators and newsrooms have been arguing, not really about whether cheap credit is good, but about who pays for it and whether the text can work at all.
Where they agree
None of them disputes that the need is real: bank credit is expensive and hard to reach for households and small firms, and the 2024 cheque reform closed an informal financing channel without replacing it. All land on roughly the same figure (100 to 130 million dinars), and all call it small. All also agree on two things the public often misreads: nobody has an automatic right to the money, the bank keeps its judgement on the individual file, and the loss, if it comes, sits on the bank's own accounts with no public compensation and no dedicated recovery mechanism. And nobody defends the text as finished, even its warmest reader treats it as something that must first be engineered into working.
Where they split
The quarrel is over the instrument or the execution. Belhadj, Rouai and Al-Khabir attack the design: you cannot order a lender to lend without pricing risk, you cannot stack a free line on top of a preferential rate you created nine months earlier, and you cannot earmark a profit shareholders have already been paid. On that reading, more circulars fix nothing. Ennaifar and Ayari read instead a usable tool, badly explained: the collateral gap is real, the sums are small, and what is missing is forms, criteria and a start date, not the idea. Bouallégui sits on the fault line: the contradiction with a 7% policy rate is real but overstated, and the gravest defect so far is institutional silence rather than the decree. Underneath it all lies an older argument about whom bank profit belongs to.
What nobody is saying
The whole argument is conducted from the balance sheet. Provisioning, dividends, share prices, the 8%, whether the central bank will police it; every contribution prices the risk from the bank's side. Nobody prices it from the borrower's. Ayari comes closest and stops there: on default, he says, the bank may pursue “the procedures provided by the legislation in force”: without anyone asking which procedures those are. The decree forbids guarantees and, as Al-Khabir notes, aims no penalty at the borrower, yet no one has spelt out what actually happens to a person who cannot repay 5,000 dinars: what recovery, what record, what consequence for future access to credit or to a chequebook: inside a mechanism whose parent law is the 2024 cheque reform, written precisely to harden the treatment of unpaid debt. The second gap is the market these loans land on. Tunisia has 288 microfinance institutions and associations, and the same borrowers currently pay portfolio yields of about 22% at Enda Tamweel and 30% at Taysir. A free 5,000-dinar bank loan sits directly on top of that clientele. Sadok Rouai made exactly this argument about the central bank's preferential rate for community companies; nobody has made it about microfinance: although the figures were published in June by one of the same newsrooms now arguing over the decree.
Belhadj calls the measure socially generous at first sight, then lists four flaws. Banks are made to lend without pricing risk, which cuts against their basic commercial logic, and the predictable response is quiet selection of the least risky files, which hollows out the social purpose. The decree asserts equality between applicants but never says how repayment capacity is to be judged in the absence of guarantees, leaving room for informal discrimination; and an envelope of around 120 million dinars makes this more symbolic than decisive. Days later he added that the mechanism stays inapplicable until the central bank publishes a circular.
”Les banques sont tenues d'accorder des crédits sans tarification du risque, ce qui va à l'encontre de leur logique commerciale fondamentale”Banks are required to grant credit without pricing the risk, which runs counter to their fundamental commercial logic
Ennaifar inverts the frame: instead of a sword of Damocles over bank asset quality, the honour credit can be an additional risk-management tool. For a small firm with a solid order book but an unconvincing balance sheet it fills the collateral gap, and it can be granted quickly where a pledge or mortgage takes weeks; it can also cover tax and social-security deadlines and spare the company a costly overdraft. He is not uncritical, though: in his market piece a week earlier he attributed part of the banking index's slide and the Tunis bourse trading halt to investors starting to price the 8% levy into valuations.
”Le crédit sur l'honneur peut jouer un rôle de catalyseur, une sorte d'effet de levier pour les dossiers fragiles mais viables.”The honour credit can act as a catalyst, a kind of leverage for fragile but viable files.
Rouai attacks not the cost but the coherence. In November 2025 the central bank's circular 2025-14 created a preferential regime letting banks finance community companies from their own resources at a rate capped at the money-market rate plus 1%. Nine months later the very same beneficiaries can obtain up to 25,000 dinars for nothing. Nobody will take the preferential rate, he argues: the new scheme renders the previous one practically void, and that is no longer a financing policy but a succession of measures piled up to sustain, at any price, a project elevated into a presidential priority.
”Quelle entreprise communautaire accepterait aujourd'hui un crédit bancaire à TMM + 1 %, alors qu'elle peut obtenir jusqu'à 25 000 dinars sans intérêt ?”What community company would today accept a bank loan at the money-market rate plus 1%, when it can obtain up to 25,000 dinars interest-free?
Ayari, the most quoted voice on the file, is managing expectations rather than condemning the text. The credit is open to every natural person regardless of profession or status (civil servants, employees, traders, farmers), but the declaration on honour confers no entitlement to the money. Each application is examined by the bank, which has at most ten working days to answer and must give reasons for a refusal, and which keeps its judgement on repayment capacity. This is neither social aid nor a subsidy: the sums must be repaid in full, and on default the bank can pursue the procedures allowed by law.
”Un crédit sans intérêts reste un crédit”A loan without interest is still a loan
Bouallégui shifts the question from the decree's content to institutional silence. Some borrowing at 0% while the policy rate sits at 7% is legally possible and, at 120 million dinars, macroeconomically marginal, she argues; the problem is that neither the government nor the central bank explains how the two fit together. No press conference, no minister setting out the philosophy, not a word from the BCT about a mechanism it is meant to supervise, and no transitional calendar for banks whose general assemblies have already allocated 2025 profits. In that vacuum, she writes, accusing banks of rebellion days after publication is a trial of intent: a bank may not refuse to open the line, but it may reject an individual file.
”aucun des deux n'explique aux passagers où va le train, ni même qui le conduit”neither of the two explains to the passengers where the train is going, or even who is driving it
The paper reads the decree as a balance of power: the state is now imposing by regulation what incentives failed to deliver since law 41-2024 came into force, and the text, it says, serves the banks' interest in nothing. But the legal footing is described as fragile. The 8% is carved out of 2025 profit whose allocation the general assemblies already approved and paid out between April and June 2026, that is, out of profit already distributed. There is no organised recovery route once guarantees are forbidden, and the decree's penalties fall on the bank, not on the borrower who fails to repay. Its question is whether the 8% will really turn into disbursed credit, or join the list of legal obligations that Tunisian banking practice has, over time, managed to neutralise.
”فالدولة تعتزم اليوم أن تفرض بالإلزام الترتيبي ما لم تُفلح الحوافز في تحقيقه”The state now intends to impose by regulation what incentives failed to achieve