Libya's central bank chaos must serve as a wake-up call for the West

Libya's Tripoli-based government's recent clumsy attempt to replace the central bank governor should be a blaring alarm in the central Mediterranean.

It quickly led to a shutdown of Libyan oil exports, Libya’s quarantining from international financial systems, and the cessation of all payments or credit in a state where people are dependent on public-sector salaries and imported goods.

The situation will create a socio-economic crisis for Libya’s long-suffering population, one that could quickly turn violent given the rivalries still tearing the country apart.

But, weirdly enough, it’s also a golden opportunity to stabilise Libya that Western actors are overlooking. Instead of watching the country’s further disintegration from afar, Europeans and the US should leverage this crisis to press for technocratic control of the bank as a prelude to much-needed elections.

From a distance, Libya’s current events might just seem regretful de rigueur, nothing new for a country so deeply knotted in calamity that even former US President Obama could only call it a “shit show”.

But what happens in Libya never ends up staying in Libya. This long-burning conflict has fuelled an insurrection in Mali, helped re-ignite the devastating civil war in Sudan, and almost pushed NATO countries to conflict in the eastern Mediterranean.

Meanwhile, the diffidence of the Western powers that helped Libya’s armed revolution in supporting its subsequent transition created a void that other powers, notably Russia, are also now happily filling.

Since Libya’s last war in 2020, Moscow has transformed Libya into the logistical hub of its Africa operations. Russia has seized military bases a few hundred kilometres from NATO’s Sicilian HQ and turned Libya’s