Can A Business Entrepreneur Save Libya?

Libyan businessman Basit Igtet is a designer. A former fashion exhibitor, he designed clothes. A former urban planner, he designed infrastructure projects for the city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia. An entrepreneur, he designed asset management and engineering enterprises spanning several continents.

Now Igtet wants to redesign his homeland. Yet he faces tremendous obstacles in a war-torn country ravaged by roving militias, government corruption and a deep history of repression under felled dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Igtet believes he’s got the technocratic prowess to transform his country of six million people from the brink of civil war into the crown jewel of northern Africa. But skeptics say his status as a longtime expatriate and his lack of national security experience leave him ill-prepared to grasp control of deteriorating relations among warring rebel factions, police and the army.

A Benghazi native, Igtet fled the country as a political exile, finding refuge in Switzerland, where he became a successful businessman. He recently enlisted the law firm of foreign policy heavyweight former Sen. Joe Lieberman in a deal likely to broker him meetings with Obama administration officials and members of Congress. Lieberman’s office did not return requests for comment.

Basit and Sara Igtet at their Manhattan home with infant daughter, Safia

Last week, Igtet, 43, flew from New York to Libya, leaving behind his wife and four-month-old daughter to try and insert himself into negotiations among rebel groups each afraid of ceding ground in a post-Gaddafi society. Deadly clashes between seven main militia factions, particularly Ansar Al-Sharia, and government forces are commonplace. Blockades continue to suppress oil production, Libya’s economic lifeblood, throwing the country into what current prime minister Ali Zeidan has termed a “financial crisis.”

Just days before the recent violence broke out last week in Benghazi, Igtet claims he’d garnered the necessary parliamentary backing to remove Zeidan in a vote of no-confidence. Under rules of the Libyan General National Congress, 120 of 200 members of parliament (60 percent) would need to vote for Zeidan’s ouster, confirmed Claudia Gazzini, a Tripoli-based, senior analyst with the International Crisis Group. As of last week, Igtet said he’s got 140 votes, but only behind closed doors; nothing’s been announced publicly, though he planned to make an announcement of his candidacy this Thursday.

“As for this Basit Igtet, I just heard about him for the first time a few days ago and have no idea if he actually has the amount of votes he claims to have,” Gazzini said in a statement emailed to Forbes. “Would seem very strange.”

Zeidan’s held power for just over a year, a term plagued by conflict between government forces and rogue armed militias culminating in Zeidan’s kidnapping by unnamed militiamen for several hours last month.

“Every day with Zeidan, this is instability,” Igtet told Forbes in a recent, wide-ranging interview. “It is the ego that lets him continue.”

Igtet said while Zeidan’s intentions were admirable, he divisively separated the country into “good” and “bad” actors—i.e. those who fought with the rebels during the 2011 uprising against Gaddafi and those who remained loyal—when he should have sought healing and unification. Igtet said clashes between militia and official forces is exacerbated by the government paying rebel groups in hopes of wooing them, but instead furthering the strife.

“It’s kind of like the gangs of New York Libyan,” Basit Igtet says of his country’s capital. “What Benghazi needs is a [former New York Mayor Rudy] Giuliani.”

However, Libyan observers are skeptical of Igtet’s claims and his appeal to the Libyan electorate, saying he’s not well known inside the country and could be viewed suspiciously as an outsider wanting to patronizingly overlay his Western-tinged philosophy on a staunchly Sunni Muslim people.

“Igtet is living in a world of fantasies,” said Karim Mezran, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who is Libyan-Italian. “They have no clue who he is. He’s not as well known as he would like to make himself out to be in the West. There has always been a search to try to overthrow Zeidan. That may happen any time, I consider it could happen. But nobody has said Basit Igtet has done any work toward that.”

Igtet said he considers himself a devout Muslim, and he’s married to a Jewish woman, Sara Bronfman, a daughter of wealthy liquor magnate Edgar Bronfman. Mezran said having an American wife is another liability for Igtet’s political career. For now, Sara said she’ll remain in New York to care for their infant daughter, Safia, but supports her husband’s work in Libya.

“I’m someone that believes people can change the world,” Sara said. “Any support and help I can give, I will be that.”

For his part, Igtet said he’s proud of his marriage and says it illustrates how people from differing cultures can unify, a metaphor for Libya.

“We want to be South Africa,” said Igtet, referring to how the sub-Saharan economic powerhouse internally reconciled after the bruising process of ending apartheid. “We don’t want to be Iraq,” he continued, contrasting ongoing, violent sectarian conflicts in Iraq following the United States’ toppling of former strongman Saddam Hussein.

For decades, Igtet’s family actively fought for Libyan reforms. While a political exile in Pakistan, Igtet said Gaddafi henchmen suffocated Iget’s father, Hassan, in retaliation for outspoken activism against the Gaddafi regime and his work building the National Library at Benghazi University.

“Gaddafi wanted to destroy education because without it a dictator can put whatever they want in people’s brains,” Igtet said.

As a young man, Igtet himself faced harassment from authorities in the mid 90s after he began to write publicly against Gaddafi’s repression. Tipped off by a family friend (the husband of a woman who’d delivered a baby under the guidance of Igtet’s midwife mother) who’d been ordered to capture Igtet, he fled Libya for Europe.

As a political exile in Switzerland, he befriended Ferdinand Lips, a Swiss banker who distinguished himself in the gold market. Through connections forged by serving as Lip’s assistant, Igtet started out with roughly $100,000 in seed money for an asset management and consulting firm that he helped grow into a multibillion dollar organization. He believes this business management experience, along with experience engineering complex real estate projects in Qatar, prepared him to lead Libya into an economic recovery through a focus on rebuilding infrastructure, improving education and Internet access in a country where just six percent of residents are online.

“I have been part of this revolution from day one,” Igtet said. “Taking away a dictator is not a solution. Africa needs this model. The world needs this model.”

Isobel Coleman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations said Igtet’s plan for reviving economic stability would be short-lived unless he finds a way to curtail the violence.

“He strikes me as a capable businessman who has a technocratic plan for Libya,” Coleman said. “[H]e’s never going to get off square one if he can’t control the militias. And I don’t know how you do that.”