Last week, John Lee (OZ ARAB MEDIA) noted:
The Iraqi Minister of Oil, Hayan Abdul-Ghani, has announced revenues of more than $115 billion from exporting crude oil for the year 2022.
More than 1,209 billion barrels of crude oil were exported, giving a daily export rate is approximately 3.320 million barrels per day (bpd).
ARABIAN BUSINESS noted, "This is a four-year high following a collapse in prices during the Covid-19 pandemic." But it means nothing for the Iraqi people because the US-installed government in Iraq has never attempted to better the lives of the Iraqi people. Nouri al-Maliki and his family got rich after the 2003 invasion, it was the Iraqi people who struggled. Jobs are nowhere to be found and politicians and officials steal the public monies. There's no investment in infrastructure. There's no investment in the people. That's what The October Revolution was protesting against: corruption that destroyed not just the chances of the young people but the entire country. Iraq is one of the most corrupt countries in the world as ranked by Transparency International. Today, RUDAW reports:
Over a thousand people held a demonstration before the Iraqi finance
ministry on Sunday demanding permanent employment at the Shiite
Endowment Office and their inclusion in the 2023 Iraqi national fiscal
budget.
The protesters, some of whom have been working with the Shiite endowment
by contract for the past 15 years, called on the government to make
their employment permanent.
“We ask for permanent employment. Three generations of the rest of the
directorates have been granted permanent employment, but we have not
been until now,” Ahmad Abdulrahman, who has been working with the office
for the past 13 years, told Rudaw’s Mustafa Goran, calling on Prime
Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani to address their concerns, saying “we
are tired, and we have had enough.”
The total number of those who are contract-based with the Shiite
Endowment Office is around 7,000, working a variety of jobs including
guarding holy shrines, doing media work, cooking, and running
administrative affairs.
This is the third protest of its kind that they have held in the course
of the past two months, but they have not yet received any answer from
the government.
At least three. Last week, RUDAW noted:
At least five people were wounded in Kirkuk on Monday as police applied
force to disperse hundreds of angry demonstrators who protested the lack
of employment by the North Oil Company (NOC) and tried to storm its
headquarters.
A total of 1350 college graduates received a six-month-long training
course by the state-run NOC four years ago, but have not yet been
employed. Of this number, Over 450 of them staged an angry protest on
Monday.
A protester told Rudaw that Baghdad already consented to employ 458 of
the trained graduates, but they were not true to their words and that
they employed other people instead of them.
And Chenar Chalak (RUDAW) reported:
Hundreds of recently graduated teachers who have been working without receiving payments for years gathered in Kirkuk on Wednesday to protest their lack of contractual employment, calling on the Iraqi government to address their concerns.
Iraq’s Education Minister Ibrahim Namis al-Jubouri announced on
Tuesday that the council of ministers has agreed to include teachers of
the graduating class of 2020 in the 2023 budget, granting them
employment by contract. The decision does not include graduates from any
other year, many of whom have been teaching free of charge and without
contracts for years.
“We teach at schools without any privileges… Yesterday evening, a
decision was issued to employ graduates of 2020, we are graduates of
2019, 2021, 2022 and we are still waiting… We have been teaching for
free for two years,” one of the protesters told Rudaw’s Hiwa Hussamadin.
Most graduates resort to teaching for free hoping it would lead to full-time employment.
The protests come as IANS notes, "The Iraqi Ministry of Planning has said that the poverty rate in the country was 25 per cent in 2022, the Iraqi official news agency reported." So oil income is at a four year high for Iraq, the highest since the pandemic started, in fact. More money than in the last four years has come into Iraq from oil revenues. And at the same time poverty has increased -- and they're blaming COVID for the poverty increase?
None of the links about want to talk about it but those living in poverty were estimated, two years ago, to be at 20%. There's been a five-percent increase in the number living in poverty and this has taken place at the same time that oil revenues have hit record highs.
This isn't about COVID, this is about corruption within the government.
[Excerpted from today's Iraq snapshot.]