How Lebanon Can Free Itself from Diesel
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After 1996, under the system built around Hafez al-Assad's dominance over Lebanon, the country was steered into a quiet but devastating energy bargain: not twenty-four-hour public electricity, but roughly eighteen hours at best, and often far less. That ceiling was not a technical accident. It created a permanent shortage, and shortage became a market. Into that gap stepped diesel, mazout, much of it linked, in Lebanese public debate and investigative reporting over the years, to wartime and post-war smuggling and trading networks in which people close to the Assad system, including figures associated with Bassel al-Assad's circle in the period when that trade flourished, were widely alleged to have played a central role in moving Iraqi diesel into the region. Whether every allegation is ever fully litigated in a courtroom, the political economy is clear: diesel filled the void left by a deliberately incomplete grid, and Lebanon's cash economy hardened around fuel.
That is where Lebanon's modern mazout story begins, and where impoverishment accelerated. Diesel did not only power homes. It created the neighbourhood generator. The generator created the local boss who controlled hours, prices and connections. Clientelism followed: a mafiocracy of district monopolies, unpaid or lightly taxed, operating beside a hollowed-out state utility. With the generator bill came the parallel bills, internet, satellite dishes, private security, until ordinary services that should have been public became a private racket. A whole informal infrastructure grew outside serious financial oversight and outside normal tax discipline. Lebanon did not merely lose hours of light. It lost the idea that electricity is a regulated public good.
The environmental and health cost was brutal. Generators burned diesel in densely populated streets, often with little filtration and little inspection. Lebanon's cancer burden has been discussed for years in medical and public debate as rising in tandem with pollution, including from uncontrolled combustion. Factories that needed predictable, affordable power went bankrupt or fled. Energy prices fed inflation. Every litre burned in a back-alley genset was a litre that priced food, transport and production higher. Mazout became a tax on the poor and a subsidy to whoever controlled the neighbourhood switch.
The first half of the diagnosis ends here: limited public supply created diesel demand; diesel created generators; generators created neighbourhood mafias; those mafias privatised the state without privatising it legally; and the country paid in cancer risk, industrial collapse and inflation.
The second half is the remedy. Lebanon will not free itself from mazout by another slogan about "fixing Electricité du Liban" while the same incentives remain. The path is disciplined privatisation of retail and collection, not chaos. Divide the country into electricity concession zones. In each zone, a licensed operator, selected by transparent public tender, sells power, bills customers and collects payment under a clear contract. The state does not disappear. It owns and leases the public transmission and distribution network, sets service standards, enforces tariffs and quality, and retains the right to re-tender a zone that fails. Concession is not abandonment; it is accountability with a map.
Within that map, artificial intelligence becomes operational, not decorative. AI can forecast demand by district and hour, balance load, detect theft and abnormal losses on feeders, flag generators still running illegally against smart-meter data, and prioritise maintenance where outages hurt most. Prepaid smart cards and digital top-ups, already familiar from mobile credit, can replace the monthly chase for unpaid bills: households and businesses buy kilowatt-hours in advance, consumption is metered in real time, and subsidies, if any, are targeted rather than poured into a black hole. AI-assisted billing reduces disputes; AI-assisted grid monitoring reduces diesel as a default backup because reliability rises.
Lebanon's exit from mazout is therefore political and technical at once. End the structural shortage that made diesel inevitable. Replace neighbourhood generators with metered, zone-based retail under law. Lease the public wires; sell the service competitively; collect through prepaid systems; supervise with data. Only then does the generator boss lose his market, the informal tax on households shrink, and the air in our cities stop paying the price of a policy chosen decades ago.
Freeing Lebanon from diesel is not nostalgia for a perfect past. It is building an electricity market that can finally run past eighteen hours, and keep the lights on without poisoning the street.