“Empty promises” under 50 degrees: A British report reviews the reality of electricity in Iraq
“Empty promises” under 50 degrees: A British report reviews the reality of electricity in Iraq
2026-08-17
Shafaq News – Translation
Unless the fundamental problem of state absence and the dominance of corruption is addressed, any talk of tackling Iraq’s electricity catastrophe in 2027 remains just another act in a long play whose ending the audience knows before the curtain rises.
This is what the British website ” Middle East Monitor ” concluded , in an article titled “Iraq’s Electricity Crises: 50 Degrees of Cooling (Empty) Promises,” translated by Shafaq News Agency, saying that you can replace the name of the current Prime Minister, Ali al-Zaidi, with any Prime Minister since 2003, and nothing will change in meaning or result.
The website explained in its report that every leader since then “made the same promise, and each of them talked about a turning point, but each of them left office without the electricity grid moving one step forward.”
The report continued, saying that “Al-Zaidi’s claim that 2027 will witness a doubling of electricity production does not reflect a vision, but is simply another number added to a long archive” of what the report called “empty promises” whose ends Iraqis already know, as Iraqis suffer from summer temperatures exceeding 50 degrees, which brings back videos of former Prime Ministers Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani, Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, Adel Abdul-Mahdi, Nouri Al-Maliki and Ibrahim Al-Jaafari, uttering the same promises about this “political curse.”
According to the report, one of the most absurd moments in collective memory occurred in 2011, when then Deputy Prime Minister for Energy Hussein al-Shahristani confidently announced that Iraq would “soon” begin exporting electricity to neighboring countries, in what the report described as a statement “detached from reality.”
The report asked: “How can a country that cannot provide its citizens with more than a few hours of electricity a day talk about exporting energy?”
The report stated that “these figures are not political rhetoric,” adding that the electricity grid remains broken, leaking, and subject not to the logic of the state, but to the logic of spoils.
The report addressed “another aspect of the scandal,” citing World Bank data indicating that Iraq lost about 40% of its electricity generation through technical and commercial losses, describing it as “a staggering figure unmatched by any other major oil-producing country.”
While Iraq relies heavily on imports of gas and electricity to operate its power plants, the report stated that the country has huge gas reserves that are still being burned instead of being utilized.
The report asked, “How can a country double its production by 2027 when it can’t even maintain its current output?” It further described the situation as “not a struggling sector, but a collapsed one, recycled every year with new promises.”
According to the report, Iraqis know the result well, as at its best the network provides families with only 8 to 12 hours of electricity per day, adding that in order to bridge the gap, citizens rely on private neighborhood generators, paying between $100 and $300 per month in Baghdad during the summer.
He went on to say that this is not an electricity system, but rather a shadow economy that operates by repackaging corruption as a service, which traps citizens between a failing state and generator owners who act as energy brokers.
The reason is simple and harsh: Iraq once had a concept of the state, however authoritarian; today, that concept has disappeared, replaced by a system whose defining characteristic is corruption.
The report argued that Iraq has lost the concept of the state it once had, even when it was authoritarian, and that it has been replaced by a system of corruption that now characterizes it.
Therefore, the report saw that al-Zaidi’s promise about the year 2027 “seems like a bad joke” in a country where temperatures can drop below 50 degrees Celsius during the summer, and where you cannot double production or transport capacity in a system built on sham contracts, unfinished power plants, neglected infrastructure, smuggled fuel, flared gas, and a depleted public budget, due to a system of political patronage.
The British report concluded that reform does not begin with a date announced by the Prime Minister, but rather with dismantling the network of interests that has turned electricity into the biggest arena of corruption in Iraq, adding that the electricity crisis is “a tragedy of a country that has lost the ability to manage the simplest necessities of life, but has not lost the ability to produce political discourse.”
He added, “The heads of government will continue to repeat the same path by saying, ‘We reassure the Iraqi people,’ but Iraqis will continue to see the same old promises every summer, where the same failures reappear.”
shafaq.com
