Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi wants to limit the role of foreigners in the economy to ensure as much of the north African oil producer's wealth as possible stays at home, he said.
In a speech carried on the official JANA news agency, Col Gaddafi added that future work on the Great Man-Made River Project, a $20 billion, 20-year-old venture to pump water from beneath the Sahara to northern cities, should be done almost exclusively by Libyans.
"Money retrieved from foreign petroleum companies and put in the treasury of the Libyan people should be spent on Libyans, and not go abroad again," Col Gaddafi told a meeting of Libyan engineers on Sunday.
"The new phase which starts as of today requires that nothing be built by foreigners, and whatever is built in Libya will be by Libyans, or else nothing would be built, because we do not want to deceive ourselves."
He said without elaborating that this requirement applied to ventures by Libyan state or private companies in Africa.
Col Gaddafi made no specific comment on the future participation of foreign companies in the oil and gas sector, the source of the overwhelming majority of Libya's foreign exchange earnings.
His comments represent a hardening of government policy to promote economic self-reliance among the population of more than five million.
Libya is seeking as much as $30 billion in foreign investment over the next 10 years to almost double oil production capacity to three million barrels per day (bpd).
US energy firms ExxonMobil, Occidental, Chevron and Amerada Hess won acreage in bidding rounds for exploration leases in 2005.
Libya wants to liberalise its command economy to fight unemployment of at least 13 per cent, trim bureaucracy, slash subsidies on consumer goods and widen the private sector's role.
In the non-energy sector, the country has won $1.4 billion in foreign direct investment in the past five years, a recent joint study by the Monitor Group economic consultancy and Cambridge Energy Research Associates said. In 2005, it won $1.0 billion of energy sector investment.
Col Gaddafi said Libya had become too dependent on foreigners.
"If we want to develop the Great Man-Made River System, from now on, we have to develop it using Libyans," he said, echoing existing state policy to promote Libyan labour in the venture.
It was not immediately clear whether his comments, which imply restrictions on foreign workers, also signalled curbs on the role of foreign companies or their share of earnings.
He added: "If we want to make a third and fourth phase of the Great Man-Made River, it has to be done by Libyans at a rate of 90 per cent to 95 per cent by you, Libyan engineers and technicians."
South Korean and Turkish companies are among the foreign firms that have worked on the scheme.
"We have no significant credit for what had been achieved in the past, because the foreigners were the ones who achieved everything from the simplest to the biggest thing. Even to install a loudspeaker here for instance we use to bring a Korean or a Chinese to install it," he said.
"We took money from foreign oil companies with one hand but we returned the money, with the other hand, to other foreign companies which paved the roads and constructed airports, agriculture buildings, factories, schools and hospitals."