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By Umar Khan.
Tripoli, 31 July:
The local administration law, prepared by the Ministry . . .[restrict]of Local Government, was published by the NTC on Thursday after it was passed by the legal department without any major changes. Law Number 59/2012, prior to being published, had been approved by the NTC in June although the ministry had sent the draft law in April to the council earlier this year. This law is also referred as “the decentralisation law” by many officials.
It will probably be the last law approved by the NTC which ceases to exist on 8 August.
The law was prepared by a team of experts who started working on it in December last year. It puts a structure of local governance in place as there was no working law of local governance in Libya earlier. It divides the cities into smaller localities, districts and municipalities that will have their own representatives working within their jurisdiction.
The newly restructured ministry of local government will be responsible for the working of the local councils. It will provide them with funding and they will have the authority, under the law 59, to invest and develop their own areas according to the requirement of the residents within their respective areas. The councils will have the power to take independent decisions on different matters ranging from security, administration, the local economy, urban development and planning and other similar fields.
The law states that the councils will be elected for four years and will have complete authority over the city. Councillors will have to be 25 years of age or older.
A series of bylaws, as a central member of the committee that prepared the law told the Libya Herald last week, are being prepared by the committee. These will exactly specify the remit and functions of different positions created for the first time in Libya.
It is planned that existing temporary local councils will keep working till the new system is implemented. Fresh representatives will have to be elected to serve the new local administrations, as stated in the article 81 of the law. It remains to be seen if all the planned elections or the preparations to hold elections in different cities,for the existing councils will now be cancelled by the local authorities.
According to experts that have worked on the law, if implemented by professional administrators, it should not take more than a year to completely map out the jurisdictions of the new council, set up them up and hold elections for them.
It is also unclear if the newly-elected National Congress will accept the local administration law in its current form. One of the main tasks of the congress is to approve a new constitution that will be prepared by an independent committee of 60 members. The main arguments will largely focus on decentralisation and federalism and local administration system will be a key component of the decentralisation debate.
Umar Khan can be found on Twitter at www.twitter.com/umarnkhan
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