Let Them Leave
On the Moral Case for Athlete Defection in a Country That Cannot Afford to Care Yet
The Uncomfortable Distinction
There is a position I hold that will seem, at first glance, contradictory. I oppose the brain drain. I believe that Tunisian doctors who leave for France, engineers who leave for Canada, academics who leave for the Gulf are participating, however understandably, in a process that hollows out the country from the inside. I believe they have a responsibility to stay, or at least to wrestle seriously with what their departure means for the people who cannot follow them. I believe that a nation in crisis needs its most capable minds more than those minds need a better salary, and I am willing to say that plainly even when it is unpopular.
And in the same breath, I will say this: let the athletes go.
Not reluctantly. Not with a heavy heart and a speech about sacrifice. Let them go with encouragement. Let them go with the full-throated acknowledgement that what Tunisia offers its world-class sportsmen and sportswomen is not a career. It is a humiliation dressed in a flag.
The distinction between these two positions is not a contradiction. It is a question of function. What does the country need to survive the next decade? And what can it not provide no matter how desperately it tries? The doctor who stays treats patients who would otherwise go untreated. The engineer who stays in Tunis builds infrastructure that would otherwise go unbuilt. These are people whose presence changes outcomes, whose skill connects directly to the material survival of the communities around them. The country is trying to hold itself together. It needs hands that can stitch.
The athlete exists in a different economy entirely. Tunisia does not lack for sporting talent. It lacks for everything that sporting talent requires to become what it is capable of becoming. And unlike medicine, unlike engineering, unlike education, the gap between what the athlete needs and what the country can provide is not a problem of political will or institutional reform. It is a problem of resource scarcity so fundamental that asking the athlete to endure it becomes, at a certain point, an act of cruelty justified by nothing more than sentiment.
What the Country Actually Offers
The numbers deserve to be stated without euphemism, because the euphemisms have done their work for too long.
Chahd Jeljeli, a twenty-year-old wrestler who competed at the 2026 Mediterranean Games in Taranto, broke her silence on social media after leaving the Tunisian delegation. She described an elite-athlete allowance of 250 dinars per month, payments that arrived every six months when they arrived at all, African Championship bonuses from 2024 and 2026 that she had never received, and a preparation regime in which she trained twice daily without nutritional supplements. Two hundred and fifty dinars. For context, this is less than what a waiter earns in tips on a slow night at a mid-range restaurant in Tunis.
Hamza Ben Amor, an African champion in weightlifting, was receiving approximately 200 dinars per month before he disappeared from the Tunisian delegation at the Junior World Championships in Spain. His mother told Al Jazeera that an 11,000-dinar prize had been promised and never paid, and that the family lived in difficult conditions. Hamza and his teammate Sajer Jebali later surfaced publicly and described the same reality: 200 dinars, poor training conditions, and a system that expected elite performance on the budget of a secondary-school student’s pocket money.
Ghofrane Belkhir, a world champion in weightlifting, a Youth Olympic gold medallist, one of the most decorated athletes in Tunisian sporting history, was reported to have been earning less than 100 dollars a month. She had previously considered quitting the sport entirely because of financial hardship. When she disappeared from the Tunisian delegation in Oslo at the 2025 World Championships and resurfaced in Germany, the institution that had failed to pay her a living wage described it as a loss of national sporting capital. They were not wrong about the loss. They were simply unable to see that they had authored it.
Amanallah Tissaoui, a Paralympic champion, appeared in emotional media interviews describing what he called humiliation: insufficient food during international competition, delayed payments, dependence on his coach for basic assistance. He claimed that during one competition he had to share meals with athletes from another country’s delegation because his own did not provide adequately.
These are not stories from the margins of Tunisian sport. These are world champions. Olympic medalists. Athletes who stood on the highest podiums available to their disciplines and returned home to discover that the country whose anthem they had heard played could not reliably feed them during competition. The pattern crosses swimming, fencing, taekwondo, weightlifting, wrestling, para-athletics, savate, table tennis, raffa. It crosses federations. It crosses Olympic cycles. It crosses generations. Mellouli. Hafnaoui. Jaouadi. Three generations of Tunisian swimmers, each producing extraordinary talent, each generating the same institutional crisis. The system does not learn because the system is not designed to learn. It is designed to react, and only when the cameras are rolling.
The Ledger (2018–2026)
And because individual stories can always be dismissed as isolated grievances, the chronology reads like an unbroken wire of emergency dispatches:
- Tarragona 2018: Gymnast Wassim Harizi vanishes during warm-ups; weightlifters Faouzi Keraidi and Sofiene Khelaifia disappear at Barcelona airport. Three gone in one weekend.
- Rome 2019: Boxers Ahmed Tabaï, Haitham Briki, and Ghaith Oueslati abandon an Olympic camp — 60% of the national squad gone overnight.
- Doha 2021: Boxer Asma Béji defects to Qatar, citing financial abandonment by the federation.
- Lampedusa 2022: 18-year-old Arab youth boxing medallist Mohamed Hedi Kacemi crosses the Mediterranean on a migrant boat.
- Sicily 2022: CS Sfaxien goalkeeper Ali Chalbi reaches Italy by sea after losing faith in national selection.
- Rejiche 2023: AS Rejiche goalkeeper Khalil Zaouali reaches Italy by boat due to severe club poverty.
- Ghardimaou 2023: CS Ghardimaou dissolves its senior football team after the entire starting lineup migrates to Europe.
- Nice 2024: 4-time African wrestling champion Abir Zarrouki walks out of a French training camp to stay in Europe.
- León 2024: Weightlifters Hamza Ben Amor, Sajer Jebali, and Loujayn Amara flee to Switzerland during Junior Worlds; monthly stipend was 200 dinars.
- Mediterranean 2024: Professional goalkeepers Yassine Rhaimi, Aziz Salami, Abdelkader Ayadi, and captain Louay Zarrouk cross clandestinely to Italy.
- Oslo 2025: World Champion weightlifter Ghofrane Belkhir abandons the delegation at the airport; joins the German national team.
- Riyadh 2026: African junior swimming champion Rami Rahmouni naturalised by Saudi Arabia after 165,000 dinars in state investment.
- London 2026: Table-tennis player Boubaker Bouras disappears from the team hotel after the World Championships.
- Taranto 2026: Wrestler Chahd Jeljeli leaves the Mediterranean Games, posting a video detailing unpaid bonuses and 250-dinar stipends.
- Taranto 2026: Gymnast Ahmed Laabidi leaves the Mediterranean Games, in a Facebook post he details how he had to live in friends’ houses.
- Rome 2026: African boules medalist Mohamed Amine Saïdi vanishes at Rome airport on the flight home.
- Rome 2026: Weightlifter Mohamed Amine Bouhajba slips away at the boarding gate, the fourth Mediterranean Games defection in one week.
Twenty-six confirmed champions in eight years. Not a leak, but a live broadcast of institutional evacuation.
The Hierarchy of Need
A country in the condition Tunisia finds itself in, navigating the compound pressures of 2026 with an economy under strain and institutions stretched to their limits, must perform a kind of triage. Not everything can be saved. Not every function of the state can operate at the level it should. And this is the uncomfortable reality that the conversation about athlete retention refuses to confront: elite sport is not, and cannot be, a priority for a nation trying to keep its hospitals staffed and its infrastructure functional.
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This is not a statement of indifference. It is a statement of arithmetic.
When a doctor leaves, the cost is measured in untreated patients, in diagnostic delays, in a healthcare system that grows more fragile with each departure. The doctor’s presence is not symbolic. It is operational. A cardiologist is not a luxury. She is the difference between a patient who lives and a patient who does not. Her expertise feeds directly into the most fundamental obligation a society has to its members: the preservation of life. When she leaves, the gap she creates cannot be filled by enthusiasm or national pride. It can only be filled by another cardiologist, and there are not enough of those to spare.
When an engineer leaves, the cost is measured in projects deferred, in systems unmaintained, in an industrial and technological capacity that atrophies precisely when the country needs it most. Tunisia’s infrastructure does not maintain itself. Its water systems, its electrical grid, its telecommunications, its roads, its ports, these require expertise that takes decades to develop and moments to lose. The engineer who stays is not performing an act of charity. He is performing an act of structural necessity. His knowledge has a direct, measurable impact on whether the physical systems that underpin daily life continue to function.
And these people, crucially, are heard. The doctor who speaks about hospital conditions carries weight. The engineer who describes infrastructure failures commands attention. The academic who publishes research on institutional dysfunction reaches audiences that can translate analysis into action. These are voices that matter not just for what they do, but for what they say. A country needs its educated class not merely as labour, but as witness. As conscience. As the people who can name what is broken and be listened to when they name it.
The athlete occupies a fundamentally different position in this hierarchy. Not a lesser position in human terms. An athlete’s discipline, sacrifice and achievement deserve the same respect as anyone’s. But a different position in structural terms. A weightlifter who wins gold at the World Championships has performed something extraordinary. But her presence or absence in Tunisia does not determine whether water reaches a village in the northwest. Her medal does not stabilise the currency. Her training schedule does not educate the next generation of engineers. Her excellence is real, but its relationship to the country’s survival is indirect, mediated by symbol rather than function.
And it is precisely this indirectness that changes the moral equation. The doctor who leaves creates a vacuum that no one else will fill. The athlete who leaves creates a vacancy on a podium that the country was never equipped to support in the first place.
The Cruelty of Asking Them to Stay
Consider what we are actually asking when we ask a Tunisian world champion to remain in the national system.
We are asking them to train in facilities that do not meet international standards. We are asking them to subsist on allowances that would constitute an insult in any professional context. We are asking them to wait months for bonuses that were promised and may never arrive. We are asking them to finance their own preparation when the federation’s administrative machinery stalls, which it does with the regularity of a natural law. We are asking them to compete against athletes from countries where sport science, nutrition, physiotherapy, psychology and coaching exist as integrated professional systems, and to do so while operating on a budget that cannot cover supplements.
We are asking them, in short, to sacrifice their bodies, their careers, their brief window of competitive viability, for an institution that has demonstrated across a decade of evidence that it cannot reciprocate. And when they comply, when they accept these conditions and win anyway, as so many of them have, we celebrate the victory and ignore the cost. We hold up the medal as proof that the system works, when the medal is in fact proof that the athlete succeeded in spite of a system that was working against them.
The case of Ghofrane Belkhir should have ended the debate. Here was an athlete who had done everything the country could possibly ask. World champion. Youth Olympic champion. Major African titles. She had climbed to the highest level of her discipline from inside a system that could barely feed her. And when she looked at what the next four years of her career would require, the training, the nutrition, the medical support, the coaching, the competitive preparation that the difference between a world-champion career and a retired-at-twenty-six career demands, she concluded that Tunisia could not provide it. Germany could. She left.
The reaction followed the familiar script. Loss of national sporting capital. Betrayal. Ingratitude. But the reaction never answered the question that Belkhir’s departure actually posed: what, specifically, were you offering her to stay? Two hundred and fifty dinars a month and a bureaucracy that takes six months to process a bonus payment? A training environment that produces champions through raw talent and personal sacrifice rather than institutional competence? A system so structurally incapable of supporting its own successes that three consecutive generations of elite swimmers have had the same fight with the same federation about the same failures?
The honest answer is that Tunisia was offering her the privilege of representing a flag while absorbing the full cost of that representation herself. And at some point, the flag is not enough. It should not have to be.
The Talent Farm
There is a pattern in global economics that development scholars have described for decades. A poorer country invests in educating and developing human capital. A richer country, with better infrastructure and higher wages, recruits the finished product. The poorer country bears the cost of development. The richer country reaps the benefit. The process is called brain drain, and it is generally understood to be damaging to the source country.
What Tunisia is experiencing in sport is the athletic equivalent, and it follows the same pipeline with remarkable precision. The country identifies a talented child. It develops that child through years of coaching, federation participation, national competition, and international exposure. The child becomes an African champion. Then a world-class competitor. Then, at precisely the moment when all of that investment is about to yield its highest returns, the athlete reaches the decision point. Stay in a system that pays 250 dinars a month and cannot reliably deliver bonuses? Or accept what Germany, or Saudi Arabia, or Qatar, or France can offer?
Rami Rahmouni, an African junior swimming champion, was naturalised by Saudi Arabia in 2026. The Tunisian Swimming Federation reported that it had invested 165,000 dinars in his development through a performance contract, in addition to Olympic Committee scholarships. Tunisia had identified him, trained him, financed his international participation, and built him into an elite prospect. Saudi Arabia acquired the finished product. The federation called it a serious warning for Tunisian elite sport. But the warning had been sounding for years. Mellouli, Hafnaoui, Jaouadi: three generations of swimmers, the same federation, the same institutional dysfunction, the same outcome.
But here is where my position diverges from the standard nationalist lament. The brain-drain framework assumes that the solution is retention, that the source country should find ways to keep its talent from leaving. And for doctors and engineers, I agree. Retention is essential because the country needs what they do. Their function cannot be outsourced. Their impact is local and immediate. Retention is not just desirable; it is a matter of survival.
For athletes, the calculus is different. Tunisia cannot build the facilities. It cannot fund the sports science. It cannot pay the coaching salaries. It cannot provide the nutrition programmes. It cannot administer the financial support systems with the speed and reliability that elite preparation demands. Not because it is unwilling, but because the resources do not exist. The country is trying to keep hospitals open. It is trying to maintain roads. It is trying to educate children. In the hierarchy of a nation under pressure, building a world-class weightlifting programme does not and should not occupy the same position as staffing emergency rooms.
And so the question becomes: if you cannot provide what the athlete needs, and the athlete’s departure does not create a survival-level vacancy in the country’s functional infrastructure, then what moral basis do you have for asking them to stay? The answer, stripped of sentiment and anthem and the warm glow of a flag ceremony, is: none.
For Once, Let Them Think About Themselves
There is something deeply revealing about the way Tunisian culture discusses athletic defection. The language is almost always one of betrayal. The athlete who leaves has abandoned the country. Has turned their back. Has been ungrateful. The framing assumes that the athlete owes the country something, that the years of inadequate funding and delayed payments and administrative humiliation are, in some moral accounting, cancelled out by the fact that the federation once registered them for a competition.
But the debt runs the other way. Tunisia owes Ghofrane Belkhir the career her talent deserved and the system could not provide. Tunisia owes Chahd Jeljeli the 250 dinars it promised and did not pay on time. Tunisia owes Amanallah Tissaoui meals during international competition. Tunisia owes Hamza Ben Amor something more than 200 dinars a month for the privilege of representing a country at the World Championships.
The athlete has already given. They gave their childhood to training halls. They gave their adolescence to competition schedules. They gave their bodies to disciplines that demand a physical toll few of us can comprehend. They gave their twenties, the years when other people are building careers and relationships and financial stability, to the pursuit of excellence inside a system that could not match their commitment with its own.
And now, when a German federation offers Belkhir what she needs, when Saudi Arabia offers Rahmouni what Tunisia could not sustain, when an athlete looks at the gap between what elite competition requires and what the country can deliver, and makes the rational decision to cross that gap, we call it defection. We should call it self-preservation.
Tunisia has world champions. It has Olympic medallists. It has athletes of extraordinary calibre in swimming, taekwondo, fencing, weightlifting, wrestling, para-athletics. The country produces talent with a consistency that would be remarkable even in nations with functioning sports infrastructure. That these athletes emerge from a system this broken is not a testament to the system. It is a testament to the athletes. And the least the country can do, when it cannot offer them what they need, is to stop demanding that they sacrifice their careers on the altar of a nationalism that the institutions themselves have failed to earn.
Let the doctors stay. The country needs their hands. Let the engineers stay. The country needs their knowledge. Let the academics stay. The country needs their voice.
But the athletes, the ones who have given everything and received 250 dinars and an apology that the bonus is still being processed, let them go. Let them find a country that can match their talent with its resources. Let them train in facilities that do not insult their effort. Let them eat properly. Let them see a physiotherapist. Let them be paid like the elite professionals they are.
For once in their lives, let them think about themselves. They have earned it. The country, by every measure that matters, has not.
