By Sami Zaptia.
Tripoli, 31 December:
The National Planning Council (NPC), the consultative body for the GNC, held a conference in Tripoli yesterday under the banner “The Permanent Meeting of Planning and Development Experts”.
The conference was attended by Juma Attaiga, First Deputy head of the GNC, Mustafa Abushagur, the former First Deputy Prime Minister, Mohamed Fetesie, former Industry Minister, Yusef Weheshy former Transport Minister, Faraj Sayah former Culture Minister and head of the NPC, members of the GNC and numerous leading academics, lawyers and experts.
Abdulsalam Ahmed, head of the Preparatory Committee for the conference opened proceedings by informing us that the NPC was initially set up in 1951 and that it went through numerous transformations and names. It is the “think –tank of the Legislative authority in Libya”, he added.
Looking at the over 200 people attending, he reminded them that under the Qaddafi regime “we were marginalized. We could not think, talk or plan. Today, how great it is, thank god, that we are able to act freely. ”
Mr Ahmed then asked the conference to stand and say a prayer for those missing, injured and martyred during the Revolution who sacrificed themselves so that Libya could gain its freedom.
First Deputy Head of the GNC, Juma Attaiga, in his official opening of the conference said that “these human resource and planning capabilities before me that were suppressed and have been freed by the February Revolution have opened the road of planning and development in its properly understood scientific context.”
“Planning was missing (under the previous regime) because of the lack of political will. There can be no real development without planning and the political will. There can also be no planning or development if there is corruption”, Attaiga warned.
“This continues even after the Revolution. If we don’t take care, we will be back to where we were. But I count on your patriotism in being a battalion that fights against corruption”, he concluded.
The conference had 5 main papers followed by discussion at the end of every topic.
The first section was on the need for planning as a pre=requisite of development. The general framework for building the constitution and the laws of the state were the second part of the conference.
The third section was on the national strategy for national security and the fourth section was on the national strategy for the consolidation of the youth and their incentivization in the development process.
The final and fifth point of discussion was the national strategy for regional development.
At the end of the conference a number of experts in the various fields of planning were to be honoured for the services they had given over the years. [/restrict]
