28/05/2026
It has been fifteen years since NATO bombed Libya’s Great Artificial River – a vast aquifer megaproject built by Gaddafi to green the Sahara and parts of the Sahel by tapping into ancient underground fossil water.
The Great Artificial River was a network of 4,000 kilometres of underground pipelines, designed to extract fossil water from the Sahara and turn the desert into farmland. The water would be drawn from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System – the largest underground fossil water reserve in the world, containing pure water that had accumulated beneath the soil 40,000 years ago.
This project would have granted sovereignty not just to Libya, but to all of Africa. And that whole business of sovereignty simply doesn’t sit well with the Western empire. The empire prefers that your country imports food and resources from the West – better that your country stays as poor as church mice, so dependent that it has to go cap in hand to the IMF.
A declassified CIA file from 1987 already warned of the “danger” this aquifer project posed to imperialist interests, stating that it “had the potential to guarantee Libya’s water supply indefinitely and considerably reduce its dependence on food imports from the West.”
That is why, on 22 July 2011, NATO planes bombed the project’s sites and even its pipeline factory in the city of Brega – ensuring that the Sahara and northern Sahel stayed poor, underpopulated, and forever dependent on food imports from the West.
They tell you Africa is poor – but they don’t tell you who is keeping it poor, or who benefits from it staying that way. Gaddafi was a terrible example for the rest of Africa: what’s all this nonsense about having sovereignty and independence? Better to raze the country and drag it back to the Stone Age, so it depends on our loans and hands over all its resources in exchange… that’s how neocolonialism works in 2026.
