Al-Bilad program on 218News raised Monday a question about why the one billion marriage fund raised all this controversy and what is the future of the second billion that will be spent on the marriage fund soon.
To shed light on this issue, the program hosted political activist Hossam El-Qamati – famous for his dialogues on the Club House and known for his bold meetings with officials – who referred at the beginning of his talk to the controversy taking place on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, regarding the Marriage Fund and asked many questions on social networking sites such as when the checks will be obtained, why the system did not accept them, and when the rest of the couples will receive their checks, amid great confusion.
El-Qamati continued his speech, saying: “We had logistical apprehensions at the beginning of the project’s launch,” pointing out that “a lot was said about the exchange of the 50.000 checks covering the one billion allocated for this fund and the great media coverage of the project,” uttering complete refusal to spend the second billion on the fund.
El-Qamati confirmed that without making a great effort, the size of the differences between the number of recipients and those who did not receive anything, and said that he contacted the coordinator of the Marriage Fund in Sirte, “Hanibal Al-Saghir”, who told him about the project, the civil registry and the forged national numbers, as Al-Saghir confirmed doubts about the major corruption taking place in the project.
El-Qamati indicated that in this matter, they discovered through research that the municipality of Sirte received only 8 checks, the municipality of Benghazi received 44, Zintan received 140, and Tripoli received 1000.
Speaking about the delivery of the checks, El-Qamati explained that there are parties that have contacted the marriage fund coordinators in a number of municipalities and asked them not to communicate with the media. There is also something like buying debts, and he warned against disbursing the second billion before many of those who are entitled to the checks receive the value of the first billion.
He called on the Civil Registry Investigations Department to intervene, saying the Public Prosecutor is aware of what happened in the marriage fund, while El-Qamati does not believe that Parliament’s decision to grant each family (50,000) dinars is feasible.
For his part, a member of the Sirte Municipal Council, Saleh Ayada, said in his intervention with “Al-Bilad”: “Today, we contacted the official in charge of marriage fund, Khaled Abu Jinnah, to find out the reason behind the delay in disbursing the checks for 400 young men and women from Sirte municipality who are registered in the marriage system, and unfortunately he did not answer the phone,” confirming, in turn, that the Sirte municipality received only 8 checks.
He also confirmed the resignation of the coordinator of the marriage fund in Sirte, Hannibal Al-Saghir, after he failed to communicate with the Ministry of Youth, pointing out the need to address the concerned authorities and hold them legally responsible. He also called on the Prime Minister to intervene to solve the existing problems.
Al-Bilad program also hosted the head of the Libyan Federation for Humanitarian and Human Rights, Wassim Al-Kabeer, who sees setting up an optimal mechanism for implementing this decision, saying that the idea of a marriage fund has existed since 2012, and at a time when Prime Minister Abdel Hamid Al-Dabaiba is to be thanked for activating the fund, the problem is, according to his opinion, the mechanism of implementation.
Al-Kabeer also expressed his rejection for the idea of giving a specific financial value in a short and specific time. What caused a problem for young people, which is the necessity of officiating the marriage. For example, within the Tripoli municipality, rents rose rapidly from 800 to 1200 dinars as soon as they heard the value of 40 thousand dinars.
