Episode: 60 — "Three Lessons from the Last Seventy Years" · Full Episode #60
Date: Season 6
Language: Arabic
Mohammed Al-Ghweil (محمد الغويل) was born in Tripoli in 1965. He is a hydraulic engineer specialising in water treatment and water infrastructure. He spent significant portions of his career outside Libya in technical roles before returning to public life. At the time of recording he was a candidate for the premiership of Libya's Government of National Unity, the executive body produced by the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum.
He brought to the conversation the perspective of an engineer first and a politician second. The episode is structured around three lessons drawn from his reading of Libya's last seven decades.
Libya gained independence in 1951. Al-Ghweil's first lesson is that the country rushed into statehood without first holding the conversation that other newly independent states held: a national charter answering the question of how a heterogeneous society of regions, tribes, languages and political traditions would live together. The constitution of 1951 existed, but the underlying social compact — the agreed terms of coexistence — was never drafted in a way that bound the population to the project of the state. The result was a state that could be undone by any sufficiently strong faction, because nothing beneath the state held it together.
His second lesson concerns the management of oil revenue. Libya began oil exports in the late 1950s and by 1962 the country had entered a fundamentally different economic reality. Al-Ghweil's argument is that no genuine societal conversation about how that revenue should be managed has ever taken place — not under the monarchy, not under Gaddafi, and not since 2011. The wealth has been allocated, fought over, stolen and redistributed, but the prior question — what the wealth is for, and which generations have a claim on it — has never been put to the public. He frames this as a structural failure that explains a great deal of the post-2011 conflict: when there is no agreed answer to who the oil is for, every faction can credibly claim its share.
His third lesson is the most contested. Libya, in his reading, cannot survive as a modern state without a strategic global ally. The geography, the demographic distribution, the resource base, and the regional position make the country dependent on alignment with at least one major external power. He does not specify which power. The point is structural: small and medium states do not navigate the contemporary international order alone, and Libya's repeated attempts to do so have been one of the recurring causes of its instability.
He used the phrase "festival of collective suicide" to describe the post-2011 period. The phrase is unusually direct in a register that more often resorts to euphemism. He applied it not to a single faction but to the political class as a whole — an ongoing, almost ritualised dismantling of the institutions and possibilities that 2011 had briefly opened.
In an aside he described a meeting at Goldman Sachs in which he raised a question about the firm's exposure to the failed investment bank Lehman Brothers. The Goldman Sachs interlocutor's response was direct: "Don't ask about Lehman." The detail is incidental to his political argument, but it functions as a small marker of the kind of room he has been in — and of the limits he has encountered when asking the question that everyone in the room is privately aware of.
"Festival of collective suicide." (EP 60)