Libya PM Dbeibah reshuffles government in bid to boost services

Libya's Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah has reshuffled his UN-backed government saying Thursday he wanted to improve its performance.

Dbeibah will remain as defence and foreign affairs minister, but he has sought to overcome regional differences with the new cabinet in which about 10 of the 27 ministers changed.

Libya has struggled to regain stability since the fall of strongman Moamer Kadhafi in 2011. The North African country has two governments, the UN-recognised administration led by Dbeibah in Tripoli and a rival government in Benghazi under Khalifa Haftar.

The prime minister's relations with key officials Mohamed el-Menfi, representative for Libya's three regions, and Mohamed Takala, head of the High State Council that acts as an upper house, had become strained because of the split of official posts between the western, southern and eastern regions.

Menfi and Takala attended the first cabinet meeting of the year following the reshuffle however.

The aim of the reshuffle was to improve "state performance", according to the Hakomitna government website.

"The goal is not change for its own sake, but to accelerate the delivery of services to citizens," Dbeibah said in a social media post.

There is only one woman in the cabinet, Randa Ghareb at the women's ministry.