Dr. Zakaria Bouguerra, a committed Tunisian doctor, died this Thursday, April 17, 2025 at his home in the northern suburbs of Tunis. His disappearance aroused great emotion in the country, as he had illustrated himself by his outspokenness and his unfailing commitment in the fight against health crises, in particular the pandemic of Covid-19. He will remain in memories as a committed health professional, not hesitating to express his convictions to protect the population.
Doctor specialist in public health, Dr. Bouguerra made himself known to the general public by his sliced positions and repeated alerts on the management of the pandemic. From the first waves of COVID-19, he pleaded for a general confinement of at least six weeks, believing that only such a measure could slow down the propagation of the virus and avoid the collapse of the Tunisian health system.
He also called for the closure of land, air and sea borders to prevent the entry of new variants, such as omicron, on the national territory. For him, prevention had to take precedence, and he did not hesitate to criticize the political decisions he deemed lax or late.
He described as “madness” the decision to reopen schools in the middle of the pandemic, believing that this endangered the lives of students and educational staff. He also criticized the lifting of compulsory confinement for arrivals from abroad, which he considered as an error that contributed to the resumption of the epidemic.
Dr. Bouguerra has never chewed his words when it was a question of pointing the failures of the Tunisian health system. He denounced the dilapidation of hospital infrastructure, the lack of means and the lack of strategic vision of the health authorities.
In 2020, he expressed his anger after the tragic death of a young doctor in a hospital in Jendouba, illustrating according to him the glaring deficiencies in the public health sector.
Beyond the pandemic, Dr. Bouguerra was worried about the economic and social consequences of the successive crises that Tunisia was going through. He called his fellow citizens to vigilance, believing that “our generation will pay dear what was done by previous generations”.
