Tripoli April 5: The Finance Minister, Hasan Zaglam, has warned the cabinet over continuing payments to revolutionaries. Speaking at the government’s . . .[restrict]meeting on Wednesday, he said that if these allowances continued to be paid, vast sums of money would be lost, especially given the inaccurate methods used for payments.
The cabinet also reviewed the fatwa by the Grand Mufti, Sheikh Sadik Al-Ghariani, presented by the Minister of Islamic Affairs regarding the payments.
The government and NTC have promised to pay LD 4,000 to every married revolutionary and LD 2,400 unmarried one who took part in the revolution last year. Many have already been paid but there have also been errors in payments. Names have been left off payment lists and others who should not have been on them have been included, leading to angry protests and road blocks and even violence in which people have been injured and some even killed.
Last month, the Grand Mufti issued a fatwa stating that it was illegal for anyone who had not fought in last year’s revolution to take payment. If they had done so they should hand the money back to the Central Bank of Libya, he ruled. Sheikh Ghariani also said that the amount of money revolutionaries could take depended on the number of months they had fought for the revolution.
The Libyan Central Bank has since set up an account to enable people to repay the money awarded to them erroneously.
There are fears that the payments are becoming seen as a right for everyone. In one case in Tripoli last week, a main road was blocked by dozens of youngsters, most no more than 15 years of age and some armed with guns, demanding that they too be given the payout.
At its meeting, the government also discussed a number of memorandums prepared by the ministerial committee appointed to evaluate the file of wounded revolutionists’ treatment abroad. It called for greater cooperation between it and the Ministry of Health on the matter.
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