No More Charity: Making Iraq's Economy Work

In 2011, the Iraqi federal budget indicated that centrally funded ministries and government departments employ as many as 2.6 million people. Add those working in public sector institutions, in local government and those who are part of the Awakening movement – a tribal-based movement that the Iraqi government pays to increase security in their own areas – and the number of those receiving a pay cheque directly from the state rises to over 3.5 million. Monthly salaries for government employees add up to more than US$2 billion.

And while the UK and the US governments employ around double that amount, their populations are significantly larger than Iraq’s, which sits at just over 30 million (the UK has over 60 million, the US over 300 million).

In 2010 a former minister of planning, Ali Baban, commented that he thought three quarters of state employees might as well be unemployed. He seriously felt they were not really doing very much work.

And despite such criticisms, the current Iraqi government recently announced tens of thousands of new vacancies in the public sector; it said that this was part of a policy aimed at reducing unemployment in Iraq. However in reality most of these new appointments are still made on the basis of sectarian and partisan decisions, or they are filled as a result of corrupt hiring practices and rampant cronyism.

Whatever the case, relying on the state’s coffers to solve the unemployment crisis is never going to work. Iraqi politicians must be made aware that the state cannot absorb the huge numbers entering the national labour force every year. Additionally just relying on the state for a job must also induce dependency and kill creative thinking. Job seekers will begin to think that the only jobs available are those provided by the government – where, quite possibly, they won’t have to do very much.

To change this, resources need to be invested in programs that encourage growth in economically viable sectors, in the promotion of small and medium-sized businesses and in the rehabilitation of the labour force. This would be far preferable to spending billions in salaries for redundant jobs.

The Solution: Renouncing the ‘Charitable Shepherd’

The best way to deal with all of this state sponsored “charity” is to renounce the prevailing attitudes about the shepherd-and-his-sheep model that is so deeply rooted in our Islamic society. This idea suggests we are living as a herd with one leader - rather than as a society where there is an implicit social contract defining our rights and our obligations to one another. We need to adopt principles based on the ideas of civil society and citizenship.