Imad Muhammad Al-Buseifi, 20, was shot dead last February by military guards at a checkpoint in Gharyan (west of Tripoli), when he failed to obey the order to stop.

“He did not stop,” said Fatima, Imad’s fiancée “because he was transporting a group of illegal immigrants -as he had been doing for the last two years- to Tripoli, the safe haven for the Africans illegally entering the country, in return for a 200 Libyan Dinars (US $155) per person.”

Imad Muhammad Al-Buseifi, 20, was shot dead last February by military guards at a checkpoint in Gharyan (west of Tripoli), when he failed to obey the order to stop.

“He did not stop,” said Fatima, Imad’s fiancée “because he was transporting a group of illegal immigrants -as he had been doing for the last two years- to Tripoli, the safe haven for the Africans illegally entering the country, in return for a 200 Libyan Dinars (US $155) per person.”

Working in the General Hospital in Mizda (West of Tripoli), Fatima says that when she received her fiancé’s corpse in the hospital, she detected five bullets in his spine.

She claimed that Imad had no other source of income. His brother and two close friends are still doing the same job for the same reason, but for 500 Libyan Dinars (US $389) for per person, ready to take the risk. 

Collecting brass

Not far away from Gharyan, Abdulsalam Al-Qmati’s wife recalled having to amputate one of her husband’s hands from the wrist and two fingers from the other one. “We were married for only two months,” she said. “My husband tried to join a group of young men from our town Qmata, 70 kilometers west of Tripoli, who used to collect brass from different places in our region; places like Bab al-Aziziya, Gaddafi’s former stronghold, and camps already shelled by the NATO planes and also from electricity poles, to sell it to smugglers.”

Misfortune 

Young people, like Abdulsalam, accept such kinds of jobs to avoid asking for money, said Al-Qmati’s wife. “It’s misfortune that drove my husband to his death. Unaware of the right brass collection methods, he was injured in a camp in Al-Hirah, west of Tripoli, by the explosion of a mine he misrecognized as a piece of brass.”

Abdulsalam, who lost his wrist and two fingers, had been working for a foreign company before the revolution, and was paid a good salary, but the company, like tens others, stopped working and are still hesitant to return to work due to security tension. Hundreds of these working for those companies have ended up unemployed.

Women resort to crime, too

It’s not only men who are obliged to accept illegal jobs. Pushed by her family’s humble standard of living and the desire to gain more money, Na’ima, a student at Tripoli University, began selling drugs on the university campus, and now most students know about her activity.  

According to a close friend speaking anonymously, Na’ima couldn’t afford the university supplies required by teachers, nor for transport, clothes or even a light breakfast or a cup of coffee.

Such high-risk life-endangering jobs are inevitable for the unemployed youth as a result of the corruption left over from the former regime era.

While great many unemployed people are wandering in the streets, Prime Minister Ali Zaidan announced in a press conference last May, that 300,000 repeated names were detected and removed from the payroll. Some of them were receiving as many as 50-60 salaries from different departments.

Idle time

“It’s likely that too much free time and the lack of jobs increases the spread of crimes among the youth, especially theft, fraud and illegal trading in hashish and alcohol,” said Mohamed Al-Qmati, an officer in the Combating Crime Department. Mohamed noted that many of the youth arrested on different charges turned out to be unemployed. Al-Qmati criticized the government for the failure of its youth employment programs, and expressed doubt about the efficiency of the plans of affiliating revolutionary groups with the ministries of defense and interiors, considering that those who joined the army or the security forces did so only to improve their standards of living, and they left once their salaries had been delayed.

Al-Qmati considers this category of armed unemployed youth as the most threatening, with many of them being arrested later for involvement in hold-ups and illegal weapon trading.

Al-Qmati wonders about the reason behind blocking the youth from working in such civil sectors like economy, oil and industry. Most prisoners, he says, insisted that paying for basic needs like food, clothing, alcohol and cigarettes had been the major motivation for their crimes.

Collective resignations

“According to the latest data from the labor system,” said Rabiaa Ammar, spokesperson for the Ministry of Labor “the number of unemployed people in Libya reached 193,000. However, there are also unregistered unemployed people and we are unable to define their number or qualifications.”

Ammar said that due to job duplication, statistics are unreliable. “The Ministry is currently witnessing a wave of collective resignations after activating the national (unemployment) number and detecting persons with double jobs. The number of resignations from the Libyan civil service has reached 31%.”

Smelting mass

The MoL spokeswoman said: “The ministry tries to contribute to solving the problem of unemployment and smelting this mass of job seekers. Five thousand young people have been employed by the Ministry of Health, and another 12,000 are currently being employed by the Ministry of Oil pursuant to the joint training program between the two ministries. Additionally, 300 training institutions within Libya have been contracted to train 18,000 jobseekers.

Ammar says that MoL has sent 300 trainees to Tunisia, and there are efforts to provide training there in different fields to 1,500 young men and women. Training is intended to start immediately after the month of Ramadan.

Denying that training would necessarily lead to employment, Ammar notes that job opportunities are often there without ministry intervention in such fields as welding underwater or maintenance of heavy machinery. Once obtaining a certificate of experience in these areas, jobseekers can find a job in the Ministry of Oil or in foreign companies operating in the country.

“Opportunities provided by the MoL within the available capacities and budget limits are insufficient,” Ammar said. “We rely too much on SME industries and on interest-free credit schemes and are preparing for public training programs in the coming period.”