It included the elderly and children of Libyan officials… Suspicion of corruption in the file of sending students abroad

The process of selecting lists of students sent to study abroad sparked widespread controversy in Libya, after the emergence of many names from the families of state officials, amid accusations of Abd al-Hamid al-Dabaiba’s government of nepotism and suspicions of corruption in this file.

A controversy erupted on social media, on Wednesday, after the publication of a list of the names of students who were included in the decision to study a master’s and doctoral degrees in Turkey, and the names of children of senior officials in the state and others without outstanding students and another group unrelated to education appeared, including people over 60 years old. Candidates for a master’s study and a female student under the age of 19 who has been dispatched to study a master’s degree in medicine.

The list of delegated students raised major objections, especially from higher education professors, amid questioning the approved selection criteria, and the existence of suspicions of corruption, nepotism and nepotism in the selected list.

In this context, Hassan Khairallah, President of the University of Tobruk and a member of the Supreme Council for Higher Education, considered, in a statement, that what happened in the dispatch lists is “catastrophic corruption that has never happened before,” calling on the Public Prosecutor, the Audit and Administrative Control Bureau, and the Prime Minister to urgently investigate and hold all those responsible accountable. about this corruption.

He added, “It pains us that the committees come and we form others over the past years to list the master’s holders, repeat students and first, then these lists come out to us, and the purpose of the committees is to procrastinate, people who have external scholarship decisions who were forced to change their path to the inside, which will negatively affect the quality of education, while those who do not deserve to be issued to them.” financial mandates.

For their part, faculty members at the University of Tripoli staged a protest against the Minister of Higher Education, the president and vice-president of the university, after they received a scholarship value of 1.6 million without actually implementing it.

In response to this controversy, the Ministry of Higher Education announced that the decisions of delegations, authorizations, and the list of delegates to study in Turkey were nominated by the Office of the Prime Minister Abdul Hamid al-Dabaiba and sent to the ministry through the Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs, adding that the ministry added to the list a limited number of outstanding students only. .

And the decision to send students to study abroad has become the prerogative of the Council of Ministers instead of the Ministry of Higher Education, since October of last year, against the backdrop of accusations against the Minister of Higher Education, Imran Al-Qayeb, of adopting nepotism in the selection of delegates.