After the government structure reforms in 2000 your
position was created in order to organize the production
activities of the public sector. Could you summarise your
fields of activity and the economic sectors and companies
you control?
Let me give you an overview of the organization of
the Libyan Jamahariya. The two basic structures are
the People's Congress and the People's Committees. The
Congress decides, and the Committees execute. The committees
start at a reduced local level, and then they get together
in a much larger scale and they create the Sha'abiyas,
or municipalities. The Sha'abiyas have all the authority
to implement all the executive procedures in its area.
The decisions that take all the Sha'abiyas in a combined
way will affect the whole State. If some issue affects
only locally, it will be treated by the Sha'abiya, if
it affects all the country, the General People's Committee
will treat it.
Two years ago it was dissolved what we call the Central
Government, but we kept a reduced central management
point to control the things that are common to all the
Sha'abiyas, Foreign Affairs, African Unity, Finance,
Economy and Trade, etc. My position is to assist the
Prime Minister to follow up the production sectors in
the whole country, and this means to manage five departments:
Agriculture, Industry, Fisheries, Livestock and Water
resources.
Due to the decentralization process, the activities
of your Ministry must be coordinated closely with the
different delegates in the Sha'abiyas (Municipalities).
Which channels do you use to achieve the common goals?
Our role is the production. We make sure that these
goods are produced and we give them to other ministries,
like the Trade, to market. We prepare for the producers
a plan that will detail the country consumption needs
and we try to solve within our possibilities the problems
they might have to achieve those production goals. We
share with the sha'abiyas this responsibility. If we
talk about an strategic industry for the whole country
we will take care of it (iron and steel, petrochemicals,
wheat, car industry, electrical industry), but if it's
a local light industry, with small-medium size which
activity doesn't affect directly the national economy
then is under the umbrella of the Sha'abiya.
We have had news of a 35 billion USD development
plan designed by the Government to modernise and update
Libya's economy. Could you explain us the main guidelines
of this plan in your sector?
In the next stage of the production sector we would
like to emphasize three areas, mainly. You know the
project of the Great Man Made River that brings large
quantities of mineral water from the desert natural
deposits. We would like to focus very much in investment
projects using this water, basically agriculture and
animal stock projects. For this sector it has been allocated
already a high percentage of the development funds.
For this reason, we are concluding several agreements
with foreign companies that are interested in investing
in these projects, like for example in the Benghazi
plains. The second sector we want to focus on is enlarging
the petrochemicals sector. It is very important that
international companies get involved in the development
of this sector.
The third area is to review our precious policies in the
production sector and implement our new strategy for the
future. In the past 33 years of the Revolution we just
depended on ourselves to produce what we needed. Now,
taking into consideration the new reality of the globalisation,
we have to join our local production sector with the international. |
The key
word in Libya's economy nowadays is diversification. The
country is too dependent on oil. In your opinion, from
all the economic sectors, which one has the greatest growth
potential and why?
We think the agriculture and animal stock sector is
very encouraging. Textile and clothing is important
because we have a high consumption in this area. The
automobile industry also provides with good investment
returns, and finally the tourism industry, where we
have made the first steps. It is a virgin country and
there is a lot of potential.
The privatisation process is one of the current
main issues throughout the world. Which is the privatisation
model that will be applied in Libya?
Let me clarify first one thing. In Libya there is not
a clear difference between public and private sector,
as in other countries. We have a board that what is
trying is to increase the number of shareholders in
each company. We don't want companies owned by one or
a couple of shareholders, as a monopoly, we want to
get all the workers involved in the shareholdership.
In case that a international investor is interested
in investing money in the company and require a large
quantity of shares in order to manage the company and
its investment, we'll study the possibility and we will
negotiate. We are open to this kind of agreements.
Which is the situation of Libyan industry in terms
of efficiency?
Libyan industries were not designed for only the Libyan
market. They were designed first for the whole Arab
world, and in some cases to cover the demand of also
the African world. Efficiency, or the relation cost/benefit,
was not the final goal of the production sector. But
now we have to study what is the demand, local and international,
what part of that demand we can cover efficiently and
focus on those industries. Now we have a great potential
market, Africa, and we have competitive advantages in
this market, as we are the first to enter and the leadership
of our country in the African Union. We signed agreements
with all African countries to liberalise trade and distribution,
so we have a lot of possibilities there.
Our common goal is attract Foreign Direct Investment
into the country and to motivate partnerships. Which
is the role that you want to give to international partners
in the production / services sector and which incentives
are you implementing to attract it?
We have a coordinating committee for investment, chaired
by the Minister of Economy and myself, which is in charge
of handling these matters and to lift all the obstacles
that foreign investors may find. We consider this investment
necessary to the correct development of the Libyan economy,
and the country is now open for it. In the last two/three
years we have taken the steps to help this investment.
In fact we have joint projects with foreign investors
worth several hundreds millions of dollars. Some of
them have been signed already, some of them are still
in negotiation.
Thank you very much for your comments
Thank you |
V.I.P. INTERVIEWS 
