LIBYA has developed an alarming knack of taking two steps forward and one step back. The elections last July to choose a congress, whose job would be to oversee the drafting of a new constitution, were widely predicted to be massive failure. In the event they were a signal triumph, with little of the violence and vote-rigging that had been expected.
Moreover the rules under which the election was conducted meant that the new congress was not split along party political lines, because around half the members had to be independents. Once again this was seen by outsiders as a recipe for chaos. But in the end, it worked very well, with the independents giving and withdrawing their support to different political blocs and even, to a degree, coming to constitute an un-rigid, non-doctrinaire bloc themselves.
Then came a big step back when the first prime minister selected by legislators to form a government, had virtually all of his choice of ministers rejected by the General National Congress. When his second proposed Cabinet met with little better response, the GNC withdrew the mandate and passed it to Ali Zeidan, who successfully put together a government and began work with immensely high public expectations.
To an extent, it was inevitable that these hopes would be dashed. The sheer quantity of political and institutional reform, which included the courts and the judiciary, would have been daunting enough, even had there been sufficient properly-qualified candidates to take on these important roles.
Unfortunately, Qaddafi’s 43 years of neglect for the Libyan education system — to say nothing of its health service — meant that there simply were not enough of the right people to move into ministries and galvanize bureaucracies, long used to being told what to do by a few important individuals within the regime. An official who had been warned from the moment he or she arrived in a ministry, that it was tantamount to a crime to exercise any form of discretion or individual judgment, was not going to suddenly leap competently at the challenges of building a new Libya.
Zeidan’s government has however been almost spectacular in its inability to get things done. Red tape has if anything actually increased, with unqualified jobsworths delaying or blocking important paperwork, for the lack of a piffling check or an all-important counter-signature. It has got so bad that ministries last year were unable to spend their allocated budgets.
The constant refrain now heard in government circles is that the administration is still battling with the doleful Qaddafi political inheritance. This is entirely true, but where are the substantive moves to create streamlined procedures, using the limited cadres of competent officials to fast-track the most important projects, such as infrastructure, health and education? Instead Libya is becoming awash with committees that are looking into endless proposals, often advised by foreign governments and NGOs. The country is becoming a planners’ paradise and a nightmare for anyone who actually wants to get anything done.
While little changes and Zeidan seeks to advance at an extremely cautious snail’s pace, by understandably trying to seek consensus at every turn, the security situation appears to be deteriorating. Benghazi, where the US ambassador was murdered last September, has long been considered off limits to foreign business because of its volatile security. This has seen a series of murders of military and security personnel, the latest being on Tuesday.
By contrast Tripoli, though divided up into the fiefdoms of a score of militias, most of whom, are nominally under government control, has been relatively peaceful. However, in the last three days there has been intense fighting in raid and counter-raid by militiamen. Disturbingly it seems that the dividing line between the rival groups is their affiliation to either the ministry of defense or the ministry of the interior.
Ordinary Libyans are sick of the violence and want peace and normality to return, to the extent that some now even regret the passing of the Qaddafi dictatorship. At least in those days, everyone knew where the danger lines were drawn in the sand.
The upshot of this is that the spirit of revolution that informed Libya’s Arab Spring and so united the country in a common cause is fading and fading fast. Libyans are once more turning in on themselves, as under the old regime. They are looking to their community leaders to guide them, and more and more, they are ignoring a government that unfortunately seems bent on making itself an irrelevancy.
Editorial: Libya’s dangerously inactive government
