This inequality between the public sector, which still enjoys (for the moment at least) wages and social guarantees and a private sector dominated almost exclusively by informality and precarity translates into daily private consumption. Adnan explains: “Public employees with regular wages are emptying supermarkets and accumulating stocks at home. Those who were forced to live from hand to mouth and couldn’t save up, are now starving.”
With the current oil crisis – the price of the Brent barrel has fallen below 25 dollars – the state’s revenues are shrinking significantly. In the short-term, the state will therefore have difficulty guaranteeing the standard of living of its employees.
The situation is aggravated by the scarcity of food and increasing prices. Adnan continues: “In this context of scarcity, traders are raising the prices of basic necessities to get rich. For example, a kilo of tomatoes normally cost USD 0,50, today they are no less than USD 1,50. The state is not able and does not want to intervene to regulate this vital problem for the majority of the population.”
For the few people who have found regular jobs in the private sector, however, he lack of workers’ rights makes them equally vulnerable to the current crisis: “A friend of mine worked for Caterpillar in a Baghdad shopping mall at USD 700 a month. Because of the virus, the shopping malls have been closed, so workers have to stay at home. But the company refuses to pay salaries during this time of non-work.”
A dismantled health system
If on the labour front informality, precarity and lack of rights are accentuating social inequalities, the health system is failing to balance them. Until the 1970s, Iraq had one of the most developed health systems in the Middle East. It was a public system, universal and free for all. Both hospital facilities and the purchase of medicines were in the hands of the Ministry of Health. With the regime of Saddam Hussein before and the wars and embargoes of the 1990s and early 2000s, the health care system deteriorated substantially. “In every major city in the country there is a hospital. But they are small, old, dirty, with poor infrastructure”, Adnan explains.
The public system has undergone the classic neo-liberal restructuring, producing clientelism and corruption: “The sanctions imposed during the 1990s and after 2003 still weigh on our health care system. The privatisation of public health care has accelerated dramatically over the last 15 years. Today we have to pay for every single visit and often, in order to get treatment, we are obliged to give a bribe to the few remaining doctors in the country.”
Before this process of dismantling public health, the Iraqi government through the state company Kimadia had managed and controlled the import of medicines. Today this public company controls only 25% of imports. According to statements from the Ministry of Health, 40% of medicines pass through the black markets of neighbouring countries and many medicines do not even arrive. Adnan says: “The medicine market and pharmacies have also been privatised and the costs have exploded. Often, doctors simply give us paracetamol even for more serious symptoms. In addition, the traders who control the distribution produce homemade and poor-quality medicines. We have many cases of people with liver and kidney problems related to taking self-produced drugs.”
Print
Maurizio Coppola | Radio Free (2020-04-01T00:00:00+00:00) COVID-19 in Iraq: the virus of social inequality. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/04/01/covid-19-in-iraq-the-virus-of-social-inequality/
Please log in to upload a file.
There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.