Lebanon's Ministry of Energy and Water has begun disconnecting roughly 100 public institutions for unpaid electricity bills — a move that is less about fiscal discipline than about political leverage. Energy Minister Joe Saddi, a member of the right-wing Lebanese Forces party, has escalated a dispute with Prime Minister Nawaf Salam's government by boycotting cabinet meetings, joined last Thursday by three LF ministerial colleagues. His stated demands: more power supply, lower fuel costs, and settlement of debts owed to the state-owned electricity company. The theatrics overlay a genuinely catastrophic infrastructure failure. Beirut once received approximately 21 hours of state electricity per day. Since the 2019 economic and banking collapse, that figure has cratered to two to four hours, with some days delivering nothing at all. The gap is filled by private diesel generators — many operated by political parties or their associates — creating a parallel economy where the failure of the state is someone's business model. The structural rot runs deep. Energy expert Jessica Obeid describes corruption across the entire electricity supply chain running into the billions of dollars. Aging power plants run on expensive diesel. The grid itself is physically damaged and requires wholesale rehabilitation. The pre-2019 model of state-subsidised electricity consumed a significant portion of the national budget, and economist Sami Zoughaib of The Policy Initiative says the state simply cannot reproduce it. "It definitely doesn't have the money," he told Al Jazeera. Qatar has offered a lifeline: two new power plants over three years and a 20-year liquefied natural gas supply deal, confirmed during a visit by Qatar's prime minister last month. A solar power project is also planned. Should the deal proceed, it would represent the most significant external investment in Lebanon's energy sector in years. But analysts are clear-eyed about the limits. Political instability — including repeated Israeli military operations — deters private capital, and seven years of unaddressed banking sector collapse signals to investors that reform will is absent. Saddi has proposed public-private partnerships as a solution, a model used globally. But the preconditions for attracting that capital — political stability, a functioning banking sector, legal predictability — are precisely what Lebanon lacks. Obeid frames the absurdity plainly: "Everything is presented as if we are inventing electricity. The year is 2026, almost 2027. Lebanon is a very small country. It just needs a vision and someone to take the bold decisions." The minister's boycott is itself a product of factional competition. The Energy Ministry was previously held at times by the Free Patriotic Movement, whose leader Gebran Bassil — himself a former energy minister who failed to deliver 24-hour electricity — has criticised Saddi's performance. Zoughaib reads the LF's boycott as a move to avoid losing popular support: if they fail visibly, they lose the ministry. The electricity crisis is thus both a genuine governance catastrophe and a prize in Lebanon's sectarian patronage system. The World Bank projects 17.5 percent year-on-year inflation for Lebanon in 2025, while fuel costs tied to the US-Israel war on Iran have driven private generator expenses higher still. The draft 2027 budget drew LF objections for insufficient attention to the electricity sector. Every government in recent memory has opted for short-term fixes over structural reform. The pattern is self-reinforcing: dysfunction creates the private generator economy, the generator economy creates political constituencies invested in dysfunction, and the cycle deepens.
