Jalel Harchaoui and Colin Powers
INTRODUCTION
Modern Libya’s trajectory has been set by the formulae determining the distribution of the country’s oil rents. Since crude oil was first discovered in 1959, it is these very formulae that underlie the forms of power, state-society relations, and social organization observed.
The same formulae are also responsible for drawing Libya’s developmental horizon. The fall of 2011 famously brought an end to the Qadhafi regime. Due to political disarray in the years that followed, however, many Qadhafi-era arrangements for managing the distribution of Libya’s oil income were kept in place. Institutionally, pillars such as the National Oil Corporation (NOC), Central Bank of Libya (CBL), CBL-owned commercial banks, and the Ministry of Finance remain preeminent.
When it comes to the tools used for distributing oil revenues across the population, public employment, public procurement and tenders, the CBL’s selective extension of letters of credit to individuals and firms, and the subsidization of essential goods remain favored. Concerning the former, public sector hiring was scaled up considerably post-2011, driven by unchecked patronage networks, the influence of armed groups, and local officials’ exploitation of weak central authority. This research report centers it concerns upon public employment in the post-2011 period. A mixed methods approach was adopted for conducting the research. To capture the lay of the land, authors first gathered and analyzed all available state-published quantitative data on public employment.
These data were, however, insufficient for deriving high-confidence conclusions for a number of reasons. First, the open source statistics that are released by institutions responsible, namely the Central Bank of Libya and Ministry of Finance, are neither consistent nor fully reliable. In addition, documentation regarding off-budget spending, including the resources allocated to cover the compensation of militias, is not publicly unavailable. Discrepancies between the expenditures announced and those actually disbursed by the Benghazi-based Government of National Stability confuse the picture further.
Dis-aggregating salary data at the firm or industry level for those employed by Libya’s 2,000 SOEs —a category of worker estimated to include 175,000 people in 20123 — is now not technically feasible. Last but not least, the books of quasi-state entities, such as the Libyan Arab Armed Forces’ Military Investment Authority (MIA), the Haftar-family controlled Military Authority for Investment and Public Works, and the Tariq bin Ziyad Agency for Services and Production4 are fully sealed.
In view of the limitations of official statistics, quantitative analysis was combined with qualitative forms of inquiry. The latter included a comprehensive literature review covering government reports, media articles, and specialized publications related to Libya’s political and economic situation. It also consisted of semi-structured interviews with a diverse sample of Libyan citizens. Mindful of the uneven geography of Libyan public sector employment, interlocutors were selected based on them living in more peripheral areas of the country: namely, Fezzan, the west coast, and the environs of Ajdabiya. The report is organized as follows. It begins with a macro overview of public employment policy.
Beyond establishing baseline empirics, this opening section considers public employment’s most salient fiscal and social consequences. Situated in this way, the report then narrows the focus to examine post-2011 changes in the public employment practices. Here, analysis centers on the rise of tribalized wasta in hiring, the privatization of public asset management, and the enduring effects of the Libyan state’s partition between east and west. The report then concludes by laying out a number of policy recommendations.
The Big Picture
Establishing the facts regarding Libyan public employment is no simple undertaking. In view of the limitations in the data—the causes of which go beyond those discussed in the introduction—any investigation into public employment must proceed in the knowledge that official figures cannot be fully trusted. Approaching the data with a necessary degree of skepticism does not mean we should discard the official figures altogether, however: They can still help us create a useful sketch of the current situation.
In terms of the guiding metrics, the Libyan Ministry of Finance asserted in November 2023 that the government workforce amounted to 2.1 million people. A ministerial review of the public sector salary structure conducted at a slightly earlier date put the number of people employed by the state bureaucracy at 2.2 million. Set in temporal context, these (slightly divergent) numbers indicate that the government workforce has more than doubled since 2012. Set in a population context, they indicate that approximately one-third of all Libyan nationals residing in their country of citizenship are notionally employed as civil servants.
It is important to note that this does not account for those on the payroll of Libya’s SOEs, its Social Security Fund, or its Solidarity Fund. Estimates from a credible interlocutor place the current number of salaried employees working for Libya’s SOEs alone at 500,000. This is roughly three times more than the figure reported in 2012, a jump driven to no small degree by the rise in “ghost” employment. At the General Electricity Company of Libya (GECOL), for instance, payroll has leapt from 18,000 to 60,000 on the back of the firm doling out jobs to individuals never expected to come to work.
For a country with a total population of 7 million, where about 3.6 million are of working age and 500,000 retired, official data suggests that more than 2.6 million are employed by the state. Paying the salaries of these millions of employees naturally translates to a sizable public sector wage bill. For the first four months of 2024, the Libyan state spent LD 20.4 billion (USD 4.2 billion) on wages. The rate of spending is broadly in line with expenditures from the previous year: Official reporting from the Central Bank presents a public sector wage bill of LD 63.9 billion for 2023, including National Oil Corporation salaries.
This was equivalent to approximately 25% of Libya’s GDP. As with reporting on employment, it is important to be mindful that the sum in question does not factor in the salaries of those employed by all SOEs, the Social Security Fund, or the Solidarity Fund.
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Jalel Harchaoui is a political scientist specializing in North Africa, with a particular focus on Libya. Before joining the Royal United Services Institute as an Associate Fellow in 2022, he worked with the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime and the Clingendael Institute in The Hague. His research primarily centers on Libya’s security sector and political economy.
Colin Powers is the Scientific Coordinator and Chief Editor of Noria Research’s Middle East and North Africa Program. He earned his doctorate from Johns Hopkins SAIS in 2020 and was a postdoctoral researcher at Sciences Po Paris in 2022. A political economist by training, his work focuses on issues of development, distribution, finance, and power.
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