In response to protests in Benghazi, the National Transition Council has declared that economic ministries will be relocated to the ruling rebels’ home city. AFP reports:

Faced with angry calls from crowds demanding that National Transitional Council chief Musfata Abdel Jalil quit, the ruling body decided to make the eastern city the future “economic capital” of the North African country.
“Despite what the army of the oppressor did to our cities and our villages, our brothers who fought against the rebels as the army of Kadhafi, we are ready to forgive them,” Abdel Jalil said.
“We are able to forgive and tolerate,” he added.
“Benghazi will be the economic capital of Libya,” NTC member Abdelrazzak al-Aradi told a news conference in Tripoli, adding ministries related to the economy would be located in the former rebel capital.

Needless to say, there are a couple reasons why this is disturbing and predictable. In their free time, authoritarian and incompetent governments love to relocate their capitals to a somewhat more central location, often in order to shore up control over restive populations: Nigeria, Burma, Tanzania, Ivory Coast, Kazakhstan, the list goes on.

Benghazi, Libya’s second city, isn’t nearly as obscure as some of those examples, but this choice seems deliberately meant to strengthen certain groups (those who were first to oppose Qaddafi, in Benghazi) and placate the masses who have already become unhappy with the NTC. The proclamation of an “economic capital” is as much about transferring a huge amount of economic activity and wealth as it is transferring political power and control. This could be just another sign of the problems that a nation riven by regional and tribal conflicts will experience as the liberation’s euphoria fades.