Kurdistan Region’s ninth cabinet marks challenging first year in office

As of Friday, one year has passed since the ninth cabinet of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) took office, a strenuous year for the government with a key strategic mission for the region.

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – As of Friday, one year has passed since the ninth cabinet of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) took office, a strenuous year for the government with a key strategic mission for the region.

The KRG cabinet, headed by Prime Minister Masrour Barzani, was formed and confirmed by the Kurdistan Parliament after gaining a majority of votes on July 10, 2019.

The regional government is primarily made of the top three political parties in the Kurdistan Region: the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), and the Gorran (Change) Movement, as well as additional minority groups.

The cabinet’s objectives circulate around six main missions - reform, good governance, digital transformation, Erbil – Baghdad relations, foreign relations, and modernizing the regional security forces.

Over the first several months of the administration’s term, it had been able to substantially minimize public expenditures and boost the local income by modernizing taxation system in the autonomous Kurdistan Region. Income, however, was dramatically cut due to the preventive measures carried out by the KRG to contain the outbreak of the coronavirus in the region and Baghdad’s decision to freeze the regional share of the national budget over oil disputes.

As recently as February, the domestic income of the KRG was IQD 258 billion (US $216 million), but the number soon drastically dropped by 75 percent to only IQD 64.5 billion (US $54 million) in March, due to the lockdown and other measures the KRG took to stop the spread of the pandemic, according to the data Kurdistan 24 obtained from the Ministry of Finance and Economy.

In addition to the domestic income, the oil sector of the KRG was also substantially affected by the drop of oil prices internationally that altogether brought the Kurdistan Region into a critical financial crisis similar to other neighboring and world countries.

The Kurdish autonomous region was one of the early first responders to the global pandemic as it begun preventive measures as early as January when there were only a few confirmed cases in neighboring Iran. The KRG has so far spent a total budget of IQD 21.3 billion (US $17.8 million) to contain the pandemic in the region, according to the Ministry of Health.

As of Friday, the KRG had quarantined a total of 18,172 individuals, carried out 156,100 COVID-19 tests, and confirmed 8,937 cases of coronavirus 3,211 of which are listed as having recovered and 305 of which passed away, according to the figures released by the Ministry of Health.

The Spokesperson for the KRG, Jotiar Adil, noted on Friday that the pandemic has also affected the implementation of the government’s key Reform Law, passed by the parliament and ratified by the Presidency of the Kurdistan Region in January.

“Carrying out reforms is this government’s main mission, and the key parties in the cabinet support it. It is the most important element in the government’s agenda,” Adil told Kurdistan 24, underlining the importance of the implementation of the Reform Law, went into effect on July 1 and should be fully implemented within three months.

“This [reform] law is part of the reform process, which covers some other subjects including revenues, government expenses and structure. But unfortunately we faced the coronavirus outbreak in the process, leading to a fall in oil prices globally. This delayed the implementation of the reform law to some extent.”

The KRG spokesperson mentioned that the current health crisis has indeed caused the Kurdistan Region to be cast into a critical financial crisis, but the KRG cabinet has said it is committed to fight the outbreak of the pandemic and tackle the economy.

“We have the will and ability to continue enforcing the reform law,” Adil continued. “By creating transparency, we can restore peoples’ trust in the government and show the government’s good will in improving relations with Baghdad, too.”

In addition to the reform process, the government has also been working on digital services. Hiwa Afandi, the Head of the KRG’s Department of Information Technology stated on Friday that digital transformation is among the top priorities on the cabinet.

“Multiple projects and achievements mark our first year in government despite pandemic and financial difficulties. To mention a few, we are at the very final stages of establishing a state of the art T3 datacenter which will power and host hundreds of digital services inside our borders complying with highest technological standards,” Afandi told Kurdistan 24.

He explained the Internal Information Stream (IIS) as an example, which is an enterprise inter-government application that was announced recently by Prime Minster Masrour Barzani to digitalize the spend request and operational budget contributing to efficiency, transparency and significant cost savings used by all ministries.

“In line with implementation of the reform law, multiple systems have been made available to help government entities execute the measures,” Afandi added.

The Department of Information Technology for the next six to eight months plan to deploy multiple digital services including Tax, e-Procurement, Payroll Management System, Human Resource Management System (HRMS), Company Registration, and Digital Identity Management System (IMS), according to Afandi.

Given the complicated politics of the Middle East, remnants of the Islamic State continuing attacks around and sometimes within the Kurdistan Region, and ongoing entrenched disputes with Baghdad to negotiate, the present administration would have its work cut out for it, even without the coronavirus pandemic crippling health and economic systems across the globe.

Editing by John J. Catherine