Corruption threat

On December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor, turned to face the governor’s mansion in Sidi Bouzid—the capital of a hardscrabble farming province in central Tunisia—and set himself on fire. His last words, aimed at the government, were an anguished question: “How do you expect me to make a living?”

What drove Bouazizi to this desperate act was Tunisia’s culture of corruption. That culture started at the very top, with President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and his political cronies, and extended all the way down to local police, for whom extortion had become a way of life.

 Cronyism Kills: Here’s How It Happened in Tunisia