Iraqis pay thousands for jobs that do not exist
▶ Street protests were fuelled by anger over a culture of bribery that runs through society, reports Ahmed Maher
Apart-time job with a temporary contract in Iraq’s Industry and Minerals Ministry cost mechanics graduate “Yasmine” $1,000. It cost “Haider” 10 times that amount to obtain a job at the Oil Ministry in early 2018.
Iraqi law might criminalise those who pay bribes as well as those who take them, but monitoring groups and officials admit that enforcement is lax.
The threat of criminal charges has done little to stop the gatekeepers to converted government posts extracting thousands of dollars from young graduates seeking work, even when the jobs either disappear or fail to materialise.
Yasmine and Haider are among several graduates who spoke to The National in an investigation into one aspect of a tangled web of corruption that has put Iraq at 160 out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s corruption perception index.
Yasmine, in her late 20s, graduated in 2014 from the University of Technology in Baghdad, one of the country’s oldest seats of learning.
She struggled to find work for five years and eventually paid a bribe to land her dream job in a ministry.
She was hired alongside 100 other graduates in February 2019. Despite paying for the job, she was told there was no budget and soon lost it.
“We were all promised that our temporary contracts would turn permanent in a few months,” she said.
“Day one in the job, a senior manager told us: ‘Forget about anything called a salary. We don’t have a budget for you.’”
Once a bribe is paid, there is no hope of a refund.
“They dismissed me.
I chased my contact on WhatsApp to get my money back but he blocked me,” she said. “I can’t report him.”
Youth unemployment stands at 36 per cent, according to the World Bank, which says that 2.5 million unemployed Iraqis need jobs.
Before 2003, sanctions and government overreach had already weakened most enterprise.
Successive governments have focused on job creation since the US-led invasion, but insecurity, corruption and political instability scared off foreign investors.
For decades, the public sector – where jobs have good pay and come with state benefits – is where most have sought work, even though starting salaries can be as low as $380 a month.
It has left Iraq with a bloated civil service that costs the state about $5 billion a month.
Three-quarters of state spending last year went on salaries – a 400 per cent increase in 15 years.
As oil prices fell globally last year, Iraq slashed the state budget.
In a crowded field, desperate and frustrated graduates – some of them jobless for years – say they have no other option but to pay for access.
Government officials given the task of ending the culture of bribery told The National that “cash for jobs” schemes were the hardest to track.
The government admitted that billions of dollars of public money had been misused or simply disappeared since 2003, while basic infrastructure and government services such as access to safe drinking water, health care and uninterrupted electricity crumbled.
Widespread street protests in October 2019 called for an end to bribery, mismanagement and unemployment. Security forces killed more than 600 demonstrators and left tens of thousands with life-changing injuries.
Firas Al Bayati, a lawyer and rights activist, said he was not surprised that many pay bribes for jobs.
“I personally dealt with many cases of Iraqis who hold degrees in science, law and business, but they hold no clout at all in public sector employment, which is based on nepotism and slush money,” Mr Al Bayati said.
“Employers should look for qualified, skilled and hardworking graduates. Here they are looking for their money.”
The belief still prevails that bribery is the only way to get things done.
Petty corruption even has its own slang: “Ween al malaat”, or “don’t forget my dues”.
In 2016, Mishan Al Jabouri, a member of parliament, said on live TV that he had taken millions of dollars in bribes.
A non-corrupt politician in Iraq is something of a rarity, Mr Al Jabouri told Itijah TV.
“I swear by my honour, I did,” he said. “We are all corrupt. I am a member of the Commission of Integrity. We open cases and then close them when we receive bribes. That’s one example.
“I took millions of dollars from one guy to close a case against him but I didn’t do that. I fooled him.”
Mr Al Jabouri refused to disclose names of other corrupt politicians for fear that “they will kill me right in the street”.
Five years on, he told The National that he categorically did not accept bribes and that the interview was an attempt to “create a shock” in a country where corruption had become a “national policy”.
Government representatives who were approached by The National for comment on corruption did not respond.
But an official with the Commission of Integrity, set up in 2004 to fight corruption, described bribes for jobs as the “hardest to track … because the job seeker deals with a mediator outside the ministry”.
The official detailed the process.
“Both finalise the deal outside before the mediator arranges the rest with an official or more than one inside these government offices who they trust very well. These officials get the names of those who paid to pick them up from the list of those submitted for the job,” he said.
“Some political parties and politicians benefit from selling jobs through mediators, as many of the announced jobs are reserved for political parties that the minister or senior officials belong to.”
The official described it as “a lucrative business that could yield hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions”.
The government is trying to stamp out the practice.
The Federal Employment Council is now the only body that announces job vacancies and receives applications. All applications and responses will be made online to help fight corruption. But the council is still awaiting funding approval from this year’s budget before it can start work.
“That could help somehow but it will not end it,” the commission official said.
Instances of officials being convicted of corruption are rare.
In 2018, an Iraqi court sentenced a former trade minister and two other high-ranking officials in their absence to seven years in prison after they were convicted of embezzling up to $14.3 million in public funds.
The case is one of only a few to reach the courts.
Haider, like Yasmine, has never met the corrupt government official he says he paid to obtain a job.
The $10,000 bribe got Haider, 28, a job in a ministry without taking government tests or having an interview.
His mother sold her jewellery. His father, who works at the Education Ministry, borrowed money.
His parents paid half of the money in advance because “we wanted to make sure my name was on the list”, he said.
A middleman gave Haider his appointment letter stamped by a senior ministry official.
But like Yasmine, he lost his job within six months after being told he had not passed the probation period.
“They are shopping for fresh graduates,” Haider said. “Some influential officials have quotas to appoint people who belong to their sect.
“But they make a lot of money out of this as they recycle the vacant posts among desperate and jobless university graduates, who are victims of this fraud even if we have paid bribes.
“I have done something wrong, I know, but what can I do to get a job? It’s a mafia, believe me.”
Corruption pushed Mostafa Turki, a University of Baghdad graduate, to join the mass anti-government protests last year.
The son of an army officer killed by ISIS in eastern Iraq’s Diyala province in 2014, he was given priority over other candidates for a job managing and arranging data and information within Baghdad Council.
But six years later, he has yet to start work.
Mr Turki, 29, showed The National the list issued in August 2015 by the council to appoint him and others who lost their fathers in the war against ISIS.
But Mr Turki suspects that nepotism or corruption led to his post being given to someone else – even if he cannot prove it.
“The government official who was processing my papers shamelessly told me he lost my documents and that I needed to resubmit new ones stamped by the Diyala provincial council in five working days,” Mr Turki said.
“I was willing to go back to unsafe Diyala but that was an unreasonable deadline to meet. I gave up.”
On day one in the job, a senior manager told us: ‘Forget about anything called a salary. We don’t have a budget for you’ ‘YASMINE’ Paid $1,000 for a ministry job