Youssef Muhammad Salem is grateful to have his current job as a company driver. As a young man in Tripoli, he has been tossed about by waves of unemployment despite his qualifications. Since he graduated from the French Division at the Faculty of Languages in 2003, he has taken on many jobs that have little to do with his academic training.

Youssef Muhammad Salem is grateful to have his current job as a company driver. As a young man in Tripoli, he has been tossed about by waves of unemployment despite his qualifications. Since he graduated from the French Division at the Faculty of Languages in 2003, he has taken on many jobs that have little to do with his academic training.

Even though Libya is located between two member states of the Organization of French-Speaking Countries, which was founded by the late Tunisian President, Habib Bourguiba and the Senegalese President Senghor in 1970, the French language has, until recently, not been a necessary qualification in the Libyan labour market. Only a small number of French companies operate in Libya and the majority of transactions with the other foreign companies are made in English.

Youssef believes that his friends who studied other disciplines are luckier than him, as the youths’ fears of unemployment among the French Department graduates and other undervalued specialties have pushed many to study traditional majors, such as medicine, engineering and teacher training institutes; hoping they will have better job security and that they will become immune to the unemployment disease, which is rampant all over the country.

Educational expert, Abdulrazaq Muhammad Kouni, however, says that the youths who turned to the said traditional majors in the late 1990s— when the numbers of university freshmen increased largely with no accompanying change in the employment system in Libya— led to a frozen bloc of local manpower, which primarily focused on the public sector.

When French became unprofitable

The signs of Libya’s antagonism with French started with political changes in the country, namely in 1985 when Libya removed French, until then a mandatory subject in secondary schools, from curricula.

The main reason was the deteriorated Libyan-French relationship, which suffered from many crises.  Most importantly was the conflict in Chad, where each country supported a different political party. This rift grew even further after a DC-10 aircraft (UTA) crashed over the Desert of Niger on 19 September 1989, killing 179. France accused Gaddafi’s regime of involvement in its detonation.

This breach directly affected Libyan Francophones and French specialists; their new language didn’t help them get a job that met their requirements, forcing them to practice other jobs even though they didn’t satisfy their ambitions.

A French Revival

However, Moncef Amdoni, in charge of the French higher education development in the French Embassy in Libya, expressed a great deal of optimism regarding the future of French, pointing to clear changes in its relevance in Libyan society since the revolution.

Amdoni believes that the number of Libyan trainees at the French cultural center has increased to around 300 students a course, while it previously had no more than 15.

Having been deliberately excluded from secondary school curricula for years, French was re-introduced in about ten specialized secondary schools in 2007, according to Amdoni. Now it has been introduced to almost all specialized high schools in the country.

Amdoni said the French Embassy is trying to spread French and solve the problem of the French Department graduates through enabling the largest possible number of them to be very well versed in French in order to ensure job opportunities, especially with the strong advent of French companies to the Libyan labor market.

Furthermore, it seeks to dispatch the largest possible number of students on scholarships to France, either free of charge, based on achievement, or at the expense of the Libyan state, hoping to maximize the use of the French mother country from a linguistic perspective.

The Libyan foreign policy of Gaddafi’s regime was an obstacle in the way of the today’s unemployed French Department graduates, which makes Youssef and others who speak this language hopeful for a new era of job opportunities through the new relations between France and post-revolution Libya.