In 2006, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister for Energy Affairs Hussein al-Shahristani, who was responsible for the energy file in Baghdad, promised Iraqis that their country would export electric power in 2011 — the same year he had promised to raise oil production to seven million barrels per day. Yet today, in 2013, Baghdad is still unable to provide power to its own citizens, while oil production (currently at 2.9 million barrels per day) will not be able to exceed the five-million-barrel-per-day threshold for several more years.
The controversy lies in the fact that when 60-year-old Shahristani, a physicist, was the minister of energy, he refused to heed the advice of then-deputy prime minister for Economic Affairs in Kurdistan Barham Saleh and Prime Minister Barzani regarding both files. So the Iraqi Kurdistan Region sought to attract more investments in the energy and oil exploration sectors, thus turning the region into a haven for international companies who were running away from the stringent bureaucracy in Iraq’s other regions.
Thus, the secret is not hidden somewhere between the investment laws of Iraq and those of the Kurdistan Region. It rather lies in a mentality of imagination and will to achieve, compared to a mentality that insists on facing today’s challenges with yesterday’s laws.
Nobody in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region claims that their experience was free of corruption, but the current opposition-led movement in the region was initially formed due to factional corruption. However, this corruption does not stand in the way, but rather on the sidelines, of development, and it is resolvable through deterrent measures. For this reason, 17% of the Iraqi federal budget was sufficient to fulfill the region’s main goals.
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Shahristani is just incompetent as so many ministers in the current government. The combination of incompetence and corruption at minister level ends in a very toxic brew for the Iraqi people. And they all are protected by the law, they are immune!
Not everything is good in Kurdistan, just that they have done less mistakes and some few good things. Nothing extraordinary if you compare with doing things correctly first time.
It is a shame that the electricity situation in Iraq and specially in south of Iraq where there is so much oil that people die because of high temperatures or lack of air conditioning. It is a shame that administrative hurdles stop the oil production and things do not get better if you make politics out of all this.
Another shame is the Central Bank of Iraq, well, we have already too many shames so lets concentrate in getting things done or out of our hands and not letting administrative politicians to ruin this country.