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Libya’s Interim Education Minister Detained Over Textbook Procurement Scandal
Libyan authorities have detained Education Minister Ali al-Abed pending investigation over alleged administrative and financial irregularities in the procurement of school textbooks for the current academic year.
The Office of the Prosecutor General announced on Saturday that both Al-Abed and the head of the ministry’s school programmes department were placed under preventive detention on suspicion of “harming the public interest and violating the right to education.”
According to the statement, the investigation focuses on contracts awarded for printing textbooks for the 2025–2026 school year, which reportedly suffered from “irregular administrative and financial procedures.” The inquiry also found that failures in the procurement process led to delays in delivering textbooks to more than two million students, causing widespread disruption at the start of the school year.
Libya’s new school term began over a month late, forcing parents of nearly 2.6 million pupils to pay for photocopied materials as the Ministry of Education struggled to distribute the officially printed books.
The controversy mirrors a previous case involving former education minister Moussa al-Megarief, who was sentenced in March 2025 to three and a half years in prison over similar negligence charges tied to textbook shortages.
In Libya’s public school system, textbooks are provided free of charge through secondary education, funded by a dedicated allocation in the national education budget – a system now under scrutiny amid renewed concerns about transparency and accountability within the ministry.
