Why does the Iraqi govt employs corrupt, unqualified and unprofessional personnel?

Nouri al-Maliki with Haider al-Abadi — Ex-Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, left, shakes hands with his successor, Haider al-Abadi, during a meeting in Baghdad, 2014. Photo: AP

Rizgar Khoshnaw | Exclusive to iKurd.net

It remains a mystery to me to why would any government employs so many unqualified and corrupt personnel knowing well that they can not succeed in governing that way. I have never in my life seen any government that would have the exact same person hold three or four different ministries at different times! How can any person be qualified, and able, to run so many ministries? But, in Iraq, this has become the norm and expected.

A huge number, if not all, of Iraqi politicians are neither experienced nor qualified to administer the ministries that they have and, as if that is not enough, they are a bunch of unashamed and habitual liars. For example, it was only three days ago when the Iraqi prime minister, Al-Abadi, prevented his deputy, Nouri Al-Maliki, from fleeing the country but, two days later, Al-Maliki is visiting Iran and meeting with top Iranian officials! How is that possible? Did Al-Abadi boldly lie to the Iraqi citizens when he said that he will not allow any politician with a rank higher than a General Manager leave the country?

And another example of how the Iraqi government has so many unqualified officials, such as the Iraqi oil minister, Mr. Adil Al-Mahdi,even thought he is educated, he lacks the proper credentials and experience to run the oil ministry. In an interview with Reuters news agency on March 26, 2015 Iraqi oil minister said, “In January prices reached the bottom and they can’t go any lower than that,” Abdel Mehdi told Reuters in an interview on Thursday. “Now they’re going up, slowly but steadily. They will go up and maybe reach $70 by the end of the year”.

When Mr. Mehdi made this comment, oil was trading around $55 a barrel. Ironically, only a couple of weeks after he made his comment, I published an article on Ekurd web site discussing oil companies and in my article, I said that oil will drop, not go up, to around $40 a barrel when it was trading at $54 a barrel. Today, oil is trading at $42 a barrel!! In my article, dated April 9, I said: The fact that the price of oil already down 50% from its recent high (around $54 as of today) of the year and will drop even further, could easily go lower than $40 a barrel.

I wish I knew where those Iraqi ministers, and their “expert” advisers are coming from and what education/qualification they posses to hold such important position with the government. You can not expect any government to succeed when they have uneducated, unqualified, inexperienced and lazy people governing. Iraqi oil revenue topped $800 billion in the past ten years and yet still Iraq has no electricity or clean water. Where did all the billions disappear to?

I honestly believe that Al-Abadi not only unable to deliver on his promise, but he is misleading the Iraqis at the same time making them believe that positive changes are coming to the country. There is no hope for Iraq and we now have proof that there is no real changes on the way either. It only took few days to see that AL-Abadi will/can not deliver on his promises to the doomed and miserable Iraqis!

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

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