Iraqi electricity and giant generators
Iraqi electricity and giant generators
2026-06-09
Duaa Hazzaa Al-Jabri
In Iraq, we lack not only electricity, but also the ability to rein in the pronouncements issued by the authorities from on high, as if they live in a different country altogether, one that suffers under the scorching summer sun and the strain of neighborhood generators. While the Iraqi citizen has been held hostage to hours of power cuts and blackouts for decades, the Minister of Electricity emerges to announce with remarkable confidence that Iraq will transfer its experience in managing the electricity sector to Europe.
What kind of experience is he talking about? Is it the experience of billions that melted away in the wires of corruption before reaching the electricity poles? Or the experience of seasonal promises that bloom every summer and then wither with the first heat wave? Or perhaps it is the experience of the citizen who pays two or three bills to the state, to private generators, and to his exhausted patience, and in the end gets nothing but intermittent light resembling flashes of false hope? What is most astonishing here is not the statement itself, but the vast chasm between official language and reality. The authorities speak the language of grand achievements, while the street speaks the language of generators, candles, and suffocating heat. Therefore, we are today faced with “two parallel Iraqs”: the Iraq of pronouncements, which is approaching Europe, and the Iraq of its citizens, which is still searching for a stable electricity supply within its borders. If Europe were to take this statement seriously, it would hasten to shut down its modern power plants and replace them with five-year plans, endless press conferences, and investigative committees. It would also import that strange ministerial art of Iraq’s: transforming chronic crises into temporary projects, and then transforming temporary projects into even more permanent crises.
The irony is that electricity in Iraq is no longer just a public service; it has become a mirror reflecting the corrupt nature of the entire administrative and political system. Every power outage is further proof of the breakdown of will, and every malfunctioning power station is a microcosm of institutions exhausted by infighting, sectarian quotas, and poor planning. Therefore, talk of exporting the experience to Europe seems more like a dark political joke than a project of international cooperation. Nations are not measured by what they say about themselves, but by what people see in their daily lives. As long as Iraqis monitor the electricity supply more than their own clocks, and as long as private generators are more part of the urban landscape than parks and libraries, talk of transferring expertise abroad seems like trying to decorate a cracked wall instead of repairing it. The problem isn’t ambition; Iraq deserves to be a source of expertise, not an importer of solutions. But ambition, when divorced from reality, becomes a form of denial, and denial, when it becomes official policy, doesn’t produce electricity; it produces more speeches that light up screens while homes remain shrouded in darkness.
So the question remains hanging above the Iraqi electricity poles: Will Europe really learn from Iraq? Or is Iraq itself still waiting to learn from its long experience with promises that lit up the pulpits and extinguished people’s trust? In the end, the problem is not that the official said what he said, but that the citizen heard him while sitting under a broken fan, in a house that used to believe the sound of the generator more than the voice of the ministry, so that there, between the darkness and the statement, the complete lie was born: a government that has not yet succeeded in convincing electricity to stay, but is thinking of teaching the world how to manage it.
shafaq.com
