My simple head gets confused when an appeal from a prestigious foundation comes to my mail asking for a few dollars’ contribution to help save Libyans who are facing death in a city that was recently swept into the Stone Age by a storm, with climate change being incoherently blamed somewhere in the mix.
This is a Libya that owns huge deposits in European banks, including a reported 143 tonnes of gold worth €8 billion ($8.57 billion), an equal weight of silver, plus cash reportedly many times more than the gold, and whose interest earned over the years has not been protected by international laws and is instead being re-invested but not in the interest of Libyan people. It is a Libya to which African leaders could rush for a quick cash bailout only 12 years ago before it was bombed into destitution.
