Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The drive to the prime minister’s office was terrifying, as most Libyan driving is. Tripolitans seem to think that traffic lights are just festive bits of colored glass strewn randomly along the roads, and they rebel against tightly regulated lives by ignoring all driving rules, blithely heading into opposing traffic on the far side of a two-way road, turning abruptly across five lanes of streaming cars. “No shortage of organs for transplant here!” a Libyan acquaintance remarked during one excursion. The driver dropped me at the wrong building. It took two hours of calls and confusion to reach my destination.

Dr. Shukri, as he is called by those close to him and by those who pretend to be close to him—he has a PhD in international relations from the Fletcher School at Tufts—had a portly grandeur. With a neat mustache and a well-tailored suit, he exuded an effortless cosmopolitanism that seemed more conducive to facilitating Libya’s reentry into the world than to winning over the hard-line elements at home. When I arrived, he was sitting on a gilded sofa in a room furnished with Arabic reimaginings of Louis XVI furniture, before many trays of pastries and glasses of the inevitable mint tea. In the Libyan empire of obliquity, his clarity was refreshing, and his teasing irony seemed to acknowledge the absurdity of Libyan double-talk.

I mentioned that many of his colleagues saw no need to hasten the pace of reform. This was clearly not his view. “Sometimes you have to be hard on those you love,” he said. “You wake your sleeping child so that he can get to school. Being a little harsh, not seeking too much popularity, is a better way.” He spoke of the need for pro-business measures that would reduce bureaucratic impediments and rampant corruption. “The corruption is tied to shortages, inefficiency, and unemployment,” the prime minister said. “Cutting red tape—there is resistance to it. There is some resistance in good faith and some in bad faith.” Nor was he inclined to defer to the regime’s egalitarian rhetoric: “Those who can excel should get more—having a few rich people can build a whole country.” Qaddafi’s Green Book decrees that people should be “partners, not wage workers,” but it is not easy to make everyone a partner, the prime minister observed. “People don’t want to find jobs. They want the government to find them jobs. It’s not viable.”

The civil service, which employs about 20 percent of Libyans, is vastly oversubscribed; the National Oil Company, with a staff of forty thousand, has perhaps twice the employees it needs. Though salaries are capped, many people are paid for multiple jobs, and if those jobs are overseen by members of their tribe, failure to show up is never questioned. On the other hand, because food is heavily subsidized, people can get by on little money, enabling them to refuse jobs they consider beneath them. Heavy labor is done by sub-Saharan Africans, and slightly more skilled work by Egyptians.

“We have a paradoxical economy, in which we have many unemployed Libyans”—the official unemployment rate is almost 30 percent—“and two million foreigners working,” Ghanem said. “This mismatch is catastrophic.” The combination of an imported workforce with high domestic unemployment is typical of oil-rich nations, but the problem is especially urgent in Libya because its population is growing rapidly—it is not unusual to meet people with fourteen children in a single marriage. Roughly half the population is under the age of fifteen.

The prime minister’s views on Islamic militants were close to those expressed by both the Leader and the Principal: “Radical fundamentalism is like cancer. It can strike anyplace, anytime, and you can’t predict it, and by the time you discover it, it has usually spread too far to be contained. Is there such fundamentalism here? I honestly don’t think so. But it could be hatching quietly, unseen by us all.” The predominant form of Islam in Libya is Sunni Mālikī, a relatively supple creed that is remote from the fundamentalisms espoused by the jihadis. Some Libyans, though, have pointed out that conditions that seem to have bred terrorism elsewhere—prosperity without employment and a large population of young people with no sense of purpose—currently prevail in the country.

The prime minister was more circumspect on the prospects for US-Libyan diplomacy. “We would like a relationship, yes, but we do not want to get into bed with an elephant,” he said, laughing, and spreading his hands wide in a gesture of innocence. “It could roll over in the night and crush us.”

I mentioned public statements he’d made about being unable to bring about reform when he had to work with a cabinet assembled by Qaddafi and asked about the constraints on his authority. Ghanem assumed the air of one confiding a great personal truth: “My ministers are like my brothers”—he wrapped his hands around his knee—“I didn’t choose them.” He paused and added with a smile, “My father chose them.”