Facts about Kurdistan: Taxi drivers with college degree!

Rizgar Khoshnaw | Exclusive to iKurd.net

I know how difficult it is to obtain a college a degree and how many hours one must dedicate daily to studies in order to achieve this goal since I have done it myself. It is absurd to see that young college graduates in Iraqi Kurdistan resort to driving a taxi for few dollars a day while most, so called “politicians,” are drowning in money.

College graduates are resorting to such degrading trade simply because there are no jobs for them either in the private sector or in the government. Whenever I travel to Erbil, I use taxis for my destination and always strike a conversation with them to find out more about life and what is going on.

Every single taxi driver complains about the fact that they hate driving all day for few dollars and that they have no other alternatives to entertain. I strongly suggest to anyone living and visiting Kurdistan to investigated this issue to see that I am 100% accurate.

The saddest thing about this situation is that this huge amount of money collected by the government, the KRG, belongs to everyone in Kurdistan since it is income generated from the State oil sales. But somehow some of these selfish “politicians” seem to never have enough of it. I do not know, and I wish to know, how these people sleep at night knowing that they are abusing their own people and power in such unjust manner. No one lives for ever and no one take the cash with them to their grave!

In the past fourteen years that I have been working/visiting Kurdistan, and being close to “certain” politicians for all these years, I have seen unbelievable amount of injustices, corruption, mismanagement and abuse. At the same time, I often read in some of the most popular and respected news papers, such as the Washington Post, around the world praising Kurdistan and its achievement and I always wondered how is that? Why are these news agencies are writing such “rosy” articles and it is 100% untrue?

Then I recently solved this dilemma when I found out that the Kurdistan Regional Government KRG (their representative in Washington, DC and other Kurdish politicians) are actually paying huge amount of money for such false and misleading advertisements!

Now I wish to make a very simple comparison to prove my point. I am going to compare Erbil, Kurdistan, the largest city in Kurdistan, to the one of the most populated cities in the world and at the same time, it is second largest city in the United States; Los Angeles, California.

Erbil:

1- Erbil covers an area of roughly six Kilometers by seven Kilometers (information gathered from Google earth web site)

2- Erbil population is 808,600 (information gathered from OCHA, a United Nations agency, study from July 2009)

3- The number of taxis in Erbil is over 35,000 ( that is thirty five thousand)

Los Angeles:

1- Los Angeles covers an area exactly 1,214 Kilometer Square (information obtained from Google and Wikipedia.org)

2- Los Angeles, population is 12,828,837 (information gathered from Wikipedia.org)

3- The number of taxis (nine different companies) in Los Angeles totals exactly 2,300 (two thousand three hundred) for all nine companies and this information can be found at Los Angels County (lacounty.gov) web site.

It does not take a Harvard Ph.D. in mathematics/statistics to figure out the ratio of taxi to people in these two cites!! It is easy to see that taxi driver occupation in Erbil is something that we should pay attention to and to determine/observe that not many Kurds are actually benefiting from the oil deals and revenues that we are seeing in Kurdistan. We all know who is benefiting in these deals, but no need to talk about this as I have covered this issue in my pervious articles.

On my next article, I will discuss another very well known and popular occupation in Kurdistan; Shoe shine !!

If KRG calls these “jobs” then they need to seriously begin to reevaluate their thinking and start to plan of creating “real” jobs in Kurdistan. And if KRG is unable to solve/tackle such problem, then they should not be surprised whenever their citizens begin to voice their concerns and make demands for better living conditions.

Rizgar Xoshnaw, a senior Kurdish writer based in Washington, a longtime contributing writer and columnist for iKurd.net.

Rizgar Khoshnaw, Washington, DC, he has lived in the US for the past 35 years. He attended North Carolina State University for a period of six years and obtained the degrees in Economics, business management and two years of Pre-Medical. He began to travel to Kurdistan fourteen years ago after being absent from Kurdistan for more than 23 years. from the first visit in 1997 to 2001, He traveled to Kurdistan 25 times to investigate the oil-for-food program and wrote a book (and had over 50 articles published) about the dishonest program. In the past eight years, he has been representing an American based company trying to implement certain projects.

The opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of iKurd.net or its editors.