Darkness: How corruption, mismanagement, and heat ignited Libya’s protests

When temperatures crossed 43°C across western Libya in July, with some places like Al-Azizia, just south of Tripoli, recording near 50°C, it was not merely the air that reached a boiling point—it was the collective patience of a population pushed beyond its limits. What began as desperate protests against devastating electricity outages, lasting up to 14 hours a day at summer peak, rapidly transformed into a full-scale political rebellion against Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh and his Government of National Unity (GNU).

Attempting to deflect mounting public anger, Prime Minister Dbeibeh took to the stage during a cabinet meeting on 18^th July to publicly lash out at the General Electricity Company of Libya (GECOL). He openly accused the state utility’s management of corruption and rank failure, claiming their refusal of administrative oversight had brought Libya “back to square one” despite billions invested in grid restoration. However, his effort to distance the executive branch from the crisis backfired into widespread public ridicule.

Libyans quickly pointed out that Dbeibeh himself appointed GECOL’s current chairman—a dentist by profession with no operational background or technical qualifications in power generation and distribution—making the Prime Minister’s sudden accusations of institutional failure ring entirely hollow.

For over fifteen years following the 2011 uprising, chronic power outages have been a grim hallmark of daily life across Libya, as generation and distribution systems remained perpetually unstable—crumbling under seasonal demand spikes during peak winter and, most acutely, mid-summer heatwaves. Except for a brief, deceptive period of relative grid stability over the past two years—which led many, apparently including the Prime Minister, to believe the crisis had been solved—the grid’s fragile architecture has repeatedly failed. This systemic dysfunction has inevitably led Libyans to draw bitter comparisons with GECOL’s operational history under the former Gaddafi regime. While occasional outages did occur prior to 2011, they were brief, localised events rather than the grueling, multi-hour daily ordeals that have come to define modern Libyan summers. Social media has since been littered with these sharp historical comparisons, with angry citizens calling out the GNU as little more than a vehicle for corruption unmatched by any other government in the country’s history.

What started as disorganised street rage quickly consolidated into targeted civil disobedience, largely spearheaded by local movements like Hirak Souq al-Jumaa (حراك سوق الجمعة). Thousands of angry youth took to the streets, moving past basic tire-burning to dump truckloads of dirt, stone, and heavy debris to block the entrances of key ministries—including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—effectively forcing a government shutdown. However, as the protests wore on into late July, the strategy hit a wall. In their desperation, demonstrators targeted critical energy infrastructure, including GECOL headquarters and the Mellitah Oil and Gas Complex, which pumps gas both to domestic power stations and across the Mediterranean to Italy. Unaware that shutting off Mellitah’s valves would directly starve local generation units and trigger a total grid collapse, protesters forced a brief shutdown before being persuaded and cleared out.

The counterproductive stunt exposed the movement’s lack of technical direction; blockading public institutions lost its appeal as citizens realised such tactics risked making their already unbearable daily conditions even worse.

Concurrently, the GNU moved to suppress religious criticism and contain growing dissent from the pulpit. The regime’s sensitivity to religious opposition came to the fore after a Friday sermon by Sheikh Al-Zain Al-Arabi Al-Dardir—preacher at the Al-Imam Al-Qarafi mosque east of the capital—went viral across social media, drawing widespread support for the cleric. Railing against state corruption, he openly condemned officials who bought 150,000-dinar generators for themselves and sent their children to study in the UK while leaving ordinary citizens in the dark, calling on Libyans to resist unjust governance.

In a clear attempt to neutralize the fallout, Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs Mohamed Bin Ghalboun received  Sheikh Al-Dardir on Tuesday, 4^th August. Official government statements framed the encounter as a discussion on “national unity” and “moderation,” explicitly emphasising recent executive guidelines designed to regulate religious discourse.

The public photo op served a single political purpose: reining in independent clerics, pressuring them to adhere to state-controlled sermon frameworks, and banning mosques from addressing political crises.

While online critics quickly accused the government of trying to buy the Sheikh’s silence with cash payoffs—a standard GNU tactic to muzzle public opposition—there is no concrete evidence to substantiate such claims. Whether the Sheikh will address these events during his next Friday sermon remains to be seen, amidst persistent rumors and unconfirmed reports that the General Authority of Endowments may have already quieted him by terminating his preaching mandate.

Beyond executive political maneuvering, the crisis exposes deep-seated structural decay across Libya’s energy sector—a stark irony for a nation sitting atop Africa’s largest proven crude oil reserves and vast natural gas deposits. Over the past few years, billions of dinars have been poured into GECOL, yet ordinary citizens have remarkably little to show for the colossal expenditure. While high-level corruption and opaque procurement contracts consume a massive portion of these funds, the physical reality on the ground has been severely compounded by years of conflict. Successive wars across the country left key generation plants battered and transformer stations heavily damaged. Compounding the physical destruction is a persistent security vacuum that has enabled organized criminal networks to systematically target the national grid—stripping thousands of meters of high-voltage copper transmission lines and stealing critical station equipment with complete impunity. Left with aging generation units, under-maintained substations, and a looted distribution network, the system remains utterly incapable of handling peak summer loads.

Yet, the responsibility for Libya’s energy predicament does not rest solely on state institutions.

Decades of heavy state subsidies have fostered a entrenched culture of unrationalized energy consumption, where electricity is largely treated as a free, endless resource.

It remains a common sight across Libyan cities to see streetlights burning throughout broad daylight, while air conditioners and lights run uninterrupted in private residences, commercial shops, and empty government offices on official holidays. Compounding this structural waste is a near-total breakdown in bill collection, as the vast majority of citizens and state entities simply do not pay their bills. In fact, Libya’s recurring blackout crisis is the product of a double breakdown: a failure of governance defined by high-level corruption and systemic neglect, paired with a public culture that has yet to adopt basic civic responsibility in power usage. Until both state accountability and public habits are addressed, the country will remain trapped in an endless cycle of darkness

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.