Some politicians in Baghdad have also been doing their best to simply get rid of whole councils in some areas.
“Doing this makes enacting the law on provincial councils even more difficult,” says Soran Ismail Abdullah, a member of the Iraqi Parliament’s Regions and Provinces Committee. “We’re going to try hard to prevent this because we need those councils to make the law work.”
Abdullah believes this is happening because some politicians want to maintain the centralized system and believe they can render the provincial councils law toothless, if they get rid of one of the main channels of communication between the voters in the provinces and the government.
Politically speaking, it’s all about power. For example, say a certain political party’s senior member is the minister of a certain ministry – take housing as an example. If the work done by the Ministry of Housing is transferred largely to the provinces, that minister, and his respective political party, will lose out. The politicians see their ministerial job as private property, a way to wield influence. So their solution is try and block that responsibility from being transferred to the provinces.
The reverse is also true. Political parties who don’t have any kind of ministry to their name want to see power transferred, in the hopes that they will get a bigger role to play in the provinces.
These kinds of disagreements and this kind of endless wrangling for power is making enacting Law 21 more than difficult.
“The members of the council are not even united about the transfer of powers,” concedes Ashwaq Hamid, a member of the Dhi Qar provincial council. “There are a lot of political parties represented on the provincial councils and their voices are deliberately scattered. This has a negative impact on public services for local people.”
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