منصة فواصل الاخبارية |
One of the greatest threats to Libya’s future is not only the decline of basic services, but the deliberate distortion of the narrative associated that highlights the state of chaos which distracts public opinion and diverts the debate away from core issues.
For example, the electricity crisis is reduced to an increase in power utilization, lack of maintenance, or budget shortfalls, while the more important questions go unasked: how did the system reach this state? Where did the resources go? And why does the crisis keep recurring despite billions of dinars spent?
The danger of this distraction is that it keeps people preoccupied with the symptoms of the crisis rather than identifying the root-cause and holding those responsible accountable, turning every failure into an isolated incident and every breakdown into a passing circumstance.
Viewed more objectively through a political-economy lens, a starkly different picture emerges: Libya’s electricity sector is no longer simply a failing public service — it has evolved into a state within the state, a key power base whose operators and backers benefit from the crisis persisting rather than being resolved.
Media manipulation operates by casting the conflict in personal terms to obscure its structural roots. Whenever the grid falters or blackouts hit at the height of summer demand, a coordinated and well-funded media apparatus swings into action, redirecting the battle down the wrong path — framing events as a personal rivalry between factions, or as an attempt by powerful interests to oust the company’s board chairman — all while pushing the narrative that the outages result from deliberately shutting down stations to manufacture a crisis.
This media narrative produces a compounded distortion: on one hand, it personalizes a structural crisis, reducing it to individuals and their agendas; on the other, it sidesteps the stark technical reality — that the grid is dilapidated and incapable of meeting summer demand, and that maintenance and development contracts have failed to produce a coherent network.
Here, the media apparatus functions as a shield, deflecting scrutiny away from the root cause and recasting the electricity sector as a black hole that swallows budgets whole and an operational cover for siphoning off and smuggling fuel.
The claim of missing funds or financial scarcity is the first layer of distortion. Successive financial data from the Central Bank of Libya and oversight bodies over the past five years confirm that the electricity sector and fuel subsidies have absorbed more emergency spending than any other sector in the country’s history.
Direct spending allocated to the electricity company — operating budgets, maintenance, emergency funding lines, and direct assignments — has surpassed tens of billions of dinars without yielding any proportional, tangible boost in available generation capacity.
Financial data show that the fuel subsidy bill alone topped one billion dollars in June, with a substantial share going toward securing light fuel and diesel for generation stations.
The problem, then, isn’t a shortage of money, but how the crisis is engineered to summon budgets — the sector has become a conduit for massive financial flows, with emergency plans and direct assignments designed to sidestep oversight and transparency mechanisms.
The crisis itself has become a vehicle for profiteering: the worse conditions get, the louder the calls for exceptional funding grow, turning financial waste into a self-sustaining operating model built on gaming both the budget and the fuel supply. Libya, an energy-producing nation, has shifted from exporting energy to serving as a conduit for smuggled imported diesel.
This dysfunction is nowhere more visible than in the energy and fuel file. From an engineering and economic standpoint, natural gas plants are the most efficient and least costly option, and Libya both produces and exports gas. Yet the reality shows a steady decline in reliance on gas, paired with a growing, insatiable shift toward diesel fuel.
This shift was not a mere planning error — it is the backbone of the financial corruption system:
1. Foreign-currency imports: the state imports fuel at world prices in hard currency to supply power plants, placing enormous strain on the balance of payments and currency reserves.
2. Operational cover: diesel-dependent power plants offer an ideal pretext for absorbing huge quantities of fuel on paper.
3. The parallel cycle and smuggling economy: national and international oversight reports estimate that a substantial share of imported fuel never fully reaches plant tanks, with quantities diverted through parallel networks for black-market sale or maritime and land smuggling.
Replacing natural gas — difficult to move and trade outside pipelines — with diesel, which is easy to transport and smuggle, illustrates how energy choices are steered to undermine operational efficiency in favor of financing parallel systems.
The electricity company has outgrown its service role to become the fulcrum balancing power among rival interests — through massive budgets, letters of credit, supply contracts, and control over fuel shipment distribution — turning into a practical instrument for financing armed groups, appeasing political forces, and cultivating loyalties.
Through this dynamic, the sector has become an artery feeding political and military influence, where blackouts are wielded as tools of pressure and political blackmail, and contracts and budgets are used to sustain a fragile peace among the powers on the ground.
Unfortunately, our media plays a negative role in this distortion. As citizens’ humanitarian suffering deepens, and both ordinary people and elites are drawn into the political struggle and the rotation of positions, media discourse is carefully shaped to obscure the root of the problem. Public debate degenerates into mutual accusations among political factions, each accused of entering the game to corrupt it — when in truth, the game itself is fundamentally built on structural corruption.
Talk of reforming the electricity sector by swapping out faces or pumping more money into the same system is a form of deception. The real solution begins with disarming this file — stripping it of political and financial exploitation — and moving transparently and directly toward running plants on domestic gas, subjecting fuel import and distribution to rigorous oversight, and courageously pursuing reform of the subsidy system, such as cash substitution. Short of that, electricity will remain a tool for managing chaos, and citizens will keep paying the price with their security, livelihood, and dignity.
The post The Electricity Crisis… Distracting Public Opinion from the Root of the Problem appeared first on منصة فواصل Fawasel Media.
