Listening to his own account claiming to live on a modest monthly salary of US$ 400, you would think Gaddafi should be eligible for social security. Never mind that this sum is nowhere nearly enough to cover the cost of his collection of sunglasses and flamboyant robes. Those who believe the Libyan dictator should of course have no problem believing that he also has no official position in Libya and that despite his constant shelling of their cities and towns, all Libyans in fact still love him. After all, it is an old saying that love hurts.
By many other accounts, it is a different story and Gaddafi may be worth as much as a $100 billion, if not more. While in the aftermath of the Libyan uprising chunks of this money have been frozen around the world, this may be only the tip of an iceberg. Not counting liquidity and other assets inside Libya itself, $70 billions have been reportedly invested in sovereign wealth funds abroad, under the umbrella of a shady Libyan Investment Authority run by the Gaddafi family and its insiders. In a country where accountability is practically non-existent, many Libyans have been left wondering about where their oil money was going and why they were being kept in the dark about it. Meanwhile, in the country they live in, the infrastructure is in shambles, unemployment, poverty and corruption are rampant and terror rules. Despite its mineral riches and small population count, Gaddafi's Libya suffers from a chronic shortage of housing, lack of basic services and a dire state of both the education and health systems. On a few occasions, sensing their anger, Gaddafi appeased his fellow Libyans with false promises that they would soon get their share of the wealth but then of course failed to deliver. On other occasions, he assured them that he was taking care of their money for them so that they would not waste it away on “silly things such as chewing gum and chocolate”. Most of the time however, he just bluntly told them that oil was simply not theirs and that they should fend off for themselves and perhaps think of emigrating instead to Africa or Europe since “Libya holds no future for them”.
While most of the Libyans have been suffering in silence, the Gaddafi family has been busy investing and buying assets and luxury property across the globe. In the aftermath of the Lockerbie bombing, Gaddafi used billions of dollars of Libya's money to bail out his regime. Billions more were spent to gain political influence in Africa and elsewhere. Millions were spent on polishing his image in the West and millions more on New Year’s parties thrown by his sons, in exotic places such as St Bart’s in the Caribbean. The likes of Beyoncé, Nelly Furtado and Mariah Carey were paid a million dollar each just to entertain the Gaddafi Juniors here and there, sometimes for less than an hour. There were of course times when bills were not paid by one son or another, for one reason or another. In 2006, during a visit to Sydney, Australia, one of the sons reportedly left the country without paying a $7000 bill at a Sydney brothel and in 2010, Saadi failed to pay a half-million dollar hotel bill in Italy, which led to a court order and an additional fee of 5,000 Euros to be paid on top.
Speaking of money, when he first grabbed power in Libya, Gaddafi had a hard time figuring out how many zeros were in a million, but he was shrewd enough to know how to use the money for maintaining power. In time, he came to know about billions and eventually even trillions. During his infamous 2009 speech at the UN General Assembly, the Libyan dictator said Africa deserves compensation from its past colonizers, a noble idea in itself. After first suggesting a figure of $7.7 trillion, he hesitated for a few seconds and then changed the amount to $777 trillion. Magic numbers aside, one is left wondering as to how the self-crowned King of Kings came up with this figure, knowing that this year’s size of the whole global economy is less than $70 Trillion. Luckily, the translator stuck with the smaller figure.
