Thousands of protesters stormed Morocco’s capital Rabat on Sunday afternoon to voice their frustration against the ‘high cost of living and repression’, in the face of surging inflation and rising social discontent in the North African country.
The angry crowd, estimated to be around 3,000 people is perhaps the largest such rally in recent months.
While they marched, they chanted, ‘The people want lower prices… The people want to eliminate despotism and corruption’.
Mr. Younes Ferachine who is coordinator from the Moroccan Social Front (FSM) group of political parties and left-wing trade unions that organised the rally said; ‘We came to protest against a government that embodies the marriage of money and power’.
People converged from across Morocco for the protest, which was also called to highlight the cases of several jailed bloggers and journalists.
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Hit by the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and inflation, poverty levels are back to where they were in 2014, the government’s High Commission for Planning said in a recent report.
Africa Today News, New York reports that consumer price inflation was 7.1 percent year-on-year in October, due in large part to surging food prices, triggered partly by an intense drought that has hit farmers.
Faced with the recent protests, Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch has lately promoted expanding medical coverage, with more than 10 million low-income Moroccans enrolling in recent weeks.
In another report, on Saturday, thousands of Tunisians demonstrated in the capital Tunis, decrying a coup by President Kais Saied and demanding accountability for the country’s long-running economic crisis, Africa Today News, New York has gathered.
Saied staged a dramatic power grab in July last year and later pushed through a constitution enshrining his one-man rule, in what critics have called a return to autocracy in the only democracy to have emerged from the Arab Spring.
Protesters in central Tunis chanted, “Down, down”, “Revolution against dictator Kais” and ‘The coup will fall.’
The march was organised by the National Salvation Front, a coalition of opposition parties including the Islamist-inspired Ennahdha that had dominated Tunisia’s parliament before its dissolution by Saied.