Jalel Harchaoui and Colin Powers

In 2021, the International Labour Organization estimated that the unemployment rate for people aged between 15 and 24 was 51.4%, and considerably higher for women in this age bracket.

Labor market conditions for those slightly older (26 to 30) are also poor. A 2021 survey administered by Asma Khalifa as part of a joint effort between the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Kantar Public, and the University of Leipzig found an unemployment rate of 26% for individuals in this prime age cohort.

Moreover, as already mentioned, the relative retreat of the state from the job market has also led to lower levels of labor force participation among younger generations. Though comprehensive labor market surveys have not recently been conducted, data released by the Libyan Bureau of Statistics revealed that a third fewer 15-to-24-year-olds were economically active in 2015 (48.6%) as compared to 2012 (72.3%).

In light of the subsequent deterioration of the security situation, it can be assumed that youth economic disengagement only worsened in the years that followed. In addition, interviewees from younger cohorts working or seeking work in a number of different locations and sectors testified to how the scarcity of public sector jobs has increased the salience of political connections, or wasta, for securing employment.

Other problems exacerbating the hardship faced by young recruits in the public sector, particularly in domains such as healthcare and education, are wage theft and the non-payment of wages. Concerning the former, interlocutors in Sebha and Muzruq reported that it is not uncommon for a high-ranking employee to confiscate a new hire’s salary for their first year of employment, conceiving this as a payment of sorts for offering the position.

Although this behavior is not institutionalized, the phenomenon is widespread enough to cause significant concern in peripheral areas, particularly in southern Libya. As for the non-payment of wages, multiple sources reported the experience as being fairly common, and being a function of bureaucratic inefficiencies. Put simply, many new hires begin working as soon as they receive an offer, fearing the job might be taken from them.

The problem is that there are often delays in the employer issuing official employee numbers. Until these numbers are registered, which can take months, no salaries are paid.

As intimated, public employment also shows geographic biases. In relative terms, new public sector job creation continues to be concentrated in privileged coastal cities such as Tripoli, Misrata, and Benghazi. The reproduction of this long-standing pattern post-2011 derives from Libya’s highly centralized institutional structures.

Empirically, its effects can be seen from a review of unemployment statistics, disaggregated at the regional or municipal level. Metrics like unemployment rates can be relied on because, as established, employment and unemployment in Libya are largely functions of public sector hiring, due to the enduring stunted development of the private sector.

As such, geographic discrepancies in employment and labor force participation may be attributed to the state’s uneven geographic reach.

Calculations based on the Libya Labor Force Survey of 2012 revealed that before civil war in Libya, the percentage of those unemployed in marginalized places such as Ghat, Jbel Gharbi, Wahat, and Sebha were already far above national averages, ranging from 20–29%.

Due to where resources were concentrated within the war economy, which subsequently consolidated, these preexisting disjunctures in labor market conditions only worsened. The effects of this have been felt most acutely by the young men and women living in the Libyan periphery, especially in the deep south. In Sebha, surveys conducted in 2022 by the REACH Initiative revealed that only 44% of the municipality’s 18-to-29-year-olds were economically active, and that 42% of those who were active were unemployed.

Put differently, a mere 18% of this cohort has a job, be that public or private sector. Just as distressingly, the survey found that 65% of Sebha’s youth classified as NEET (not in employment, education, or training), a troubling forward-looking indicator if ever there was one.

The Tribalization of Wasta

Public employment in Libya today is not only troubled by high fiscal costs and declining social returns: It is also being compromised by tribalized forms of corruption. Indeed, the latter is increasingly seen within SOEs and the civil service alike. When it comes to SOEs, data gathered about the oil industry near Ajdabiya in Libya’s east revealed a distressing picture.

Following Farhat Bengdara’s appointment as Chairman of the National Oil Corporation (NOC) and Massoud Slimane’s appointment to the NOC’s board in July 2022, virtually all hiring decisions have been decoupled from economic considerations. Instead, they have been driven by patronage and determined on the basis of tribal affiliation.

The biggest beneficiaries of the current policy in and around Ajdabiya have been Slimane’s Magharba tribe as well as those affiliated with the Awaqir and Aqjilah tribes. For the NOC itself, in contrast, wasta-led employment policies have led to a host of issues. Non-essential, politically motivated hiring campaigns have caused liquidity shortages on a number of occasions, resulting in delayed salary payments. Higher personnel costs also led to the canceling of a continuing education program that had been provided to the workforce.

The effects of tribalized wasta for the civil service are every bit as pernicious.

Interlocutors in Fezzan noted that the Ministry of Health under Ramadan Abu Janah’s leadership has become rife with this kind of corruption. Hiring of administrative and medical personnel at the Ministry has been used to reward those from Abu Janah’s Hasawna tribe in particular.

Moreover, unsurprisingly, wasta-led hiring has been much to the detriment of public service quality. Indeed, politicized hiring decisions resulted in acute shortages of competent personnel at public hospitals.31 Such shortages and the hiring practices which cause them have had a number of second-order effects, too.

Most directly, they have forced doctors and patients to seek private alternatives for their employment and healthcare needs, respectively, and pushed up out-of-pocket healthcare expenditures for families across the south.

Further, there are grounds for thinking the link between wasta and declining public service quality extends well beyond the Ministry of Health. The excellent research by Mohamed Elmagbri, Heba al-Sheikh, Lamis Ben Aiyad, and Rima Hamidan established how the combination of political conflict, civil war, hierarchical bureaucracy, and corruption have undermined waste management, electricity provision, and water supply services in recent years.

The tragic flooding of Derna, which cost more than 20,000 lives in 2023, revealed the degree to which corruption plagues infrastructure maintenance. The extensive investigations conducted by the Bertelsmann Stiftung between 2021 and 2023 also documented how corruption has compromised the Ministry of Education and the administrative state more generally.

Of course, the issue of underperforming public services predates the post-2011 period in Libya, and is not something that was solely caused by wasta. Nevertheless, our research suggests that wasta’s increasing grip, itself a function of the political classes’ attempts to purchase legitimacy, is today one of the key factors driving corruption and attendant declines in the commercial performance SOEs and public service quality.

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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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