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By Sami Zaptia.
Tripoli, 25 April 2013:
Omar Hmeidan, the GNC’s official spokesperson, confirmed during Tuesday’s (23 April) press conference that the GNC . . .[restrict]had agreed unanimously last Sunday (21 April) on the proposal put forward by 140 GNC members to send 30,000 (thirty thousand) Libyans abroad for study and training.
It was proposed that 20,000 be sent abroad for training courses and the remaining 10,000 be sent on study courses.
The GNC has proposed that a total budget worth LD 10 billion (US$ 7.8 billion) be set aside for this proposal. Three billion would be earmarked for financing study abroad while 5 or 7 billion would be used to support and encourage SMEs.
It is not clear where this money would be sourced from and whether it would be sourced from the current 2013 budget or from new sources of finance, such as Libya’s Libyan dinar or foreign currency reserves, or even from some of Libya’s overseas assets.
It will be recalled that Libya’s 2013 budget totaled LD 66.86 billion and this new proposal of LD 10 billion by the GNC, as opposed to the government, would constitute about 15 percent of the total 2013 budget.
It also happens to be about the same amount that was allocated to food, fuels and electricity subsidies which total LD 10.6 billion or 16 percent of the total budget.
|
Section |
Details |
LD billion |
Percentage |
|
|
1 |
Section One | Salaries | 20,783,302,000 |
31 |
|
2 |
Section Two | Operational expenditure | 10,770,362,000 |
16 |
|
3 |
Section Three | Development & Reconstruction Projects | 19,300,000,000 |
28 |
|
4 |
Section Four | Subsidies & Price Stabilization Fund | 10,607,850,000 |
16 |
|
5 |
The General Reserve including the Child Benefit | 5,400,000,000 |
8 |
|
|
6 |
TOTAL | 66,861,514,000 |
It was also not clarified by the GNC whether this budget and the 30,000 potential students and trainees would include the tens if not hundreds of thousands of former militiamen (thuwar) that were surveyed and organized in a nationwide database by the Warriors Affairs Commission (WAC).
Libya Herald understands from senior sources at WAC that it had put forward a proposal to the Al-Kib government last year for a comprehensive training and study plan for all those militiamen who had expressed a desire to do so.
The WAC plan had included varying levels of studies and training locally and abroad for militiamen depending on their qualifications and capabilities. This plan was estimated at the time to be in the region of half a billion Libyan dinars. However, the Al-Kib government did not activate the plan.
With regards to the SMEs, ever since the days of the former regime and during the time when Mahmoud Jibril was head of the Economic Development Board (EDB), the government had been threatening to allocate half a billion Libyan dinars to support the SMEs via local commercial banks and guaranteed by the state via the Loans Guarantee Fund.
In practice, nothing ever materialised. it will be interesting to see the small print in this latest GNC proposal and see if this grand figure will consolidate all of the militiamen, the unemplyed and newly graduated start-ups as a comprehensive solution.
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