The new round of student protests in the Kurdistan Region show that students and government stakeholders are at a disjuncture when viewing the reform initiatives. Even though students initially demanded that the KRG pay their overdue stipends of about 40-70 USD per month, the violent crackdown of the protesters is far more revealing of what is at stake for both the students and the government.
Underneath the demand for the reinstallation of the financial assistance were calls for more robust reforms in the government and the educational system. The harsh reaction of the security forces to these demands, such as the student arrests that followed, combined with the responses to the events from top government and political officials, show the KRG’s critical position vis-à-vis the economic, political, and educational reforms in the Region.
Such regular protests beg the question: Are the KRG’s policymakers able to meet students’ demands instead of using the educational system to stall social and political dissent?
The KRG’s austerity measures, taken in response to drops in oil prices, the fight against ISIS, and the budget dispute with Baghdad, have hit the educational sector particularly hard. According to a report by the UNICEF, spending on education in the Region for the 2014-2015 academic year was only about 40 USD per student, much lower compared to the 1000 USD spent in the rest of Iraq.
The Region's political duopoly had relied on a bulging public payroll, free education, and the distribution of stipends as a tool for political patronage at the expense of merit. The KRG and political parties have realized, now, that these efforts not only have ceased to bare the desired political and economic fruit but that fiscally they have become too expensive to maintain.
To this day, public universities lack autonomy thanks to micromanaging by the KRG. They await government approval to spend their budget and even hire their staff. University revenues are handed over to the Ministry of Higher Education, then to the Ministry of Finance, which are then thawed into the public budget and spent on other government priorities rather than on the universities’ own development.
Against years of institutional and financial incapacitation, academic fragility, and political tampering, universities have become incapable of carrying out the mediocre political role assigned to them in quenching the KRG leaders’ thirst for social and political stability.
To initiate reform, the KRG leadership has adopted a privatization scheme as the basis for educational restructuring and government downsizing. However, the KRG has put itself in a predicament since, historically, people’s dependency on the government has been its asset for social and political stability.
Privatization in the health, power, and education sectors, as well as public salary and pension cuts, have increased the household bills of citizens across the Region. Many college graduates have also realized that their employment opportunities in the public sector have withered, seeing little hope in finding decent work in the Region's volatile private sector.
The discourse of educational quality and accountability, and private sector invigoration, do not carry much weight in the face of rising unemployment rates and a bulging corruption that is draining the region’s economy. So far, the KRG’s educational reform efforts amidst its downsizing schemes has proven hollow.
As public employment shrinks, the fragile private sector in the Region is unable to compete with, let alone absorb, the armies of university graduates every year. It is even less so when the market is an extension of the state capture of ruling parties and their patronage. These realities have deemed the privatization rhetoric for economic growth a mere façade to sidetrack liability from the powers that have historically subdued the government and swelled its spending.
The KRG leaders and policymakers should take the episodes of unrest among students and teachers protesting these government measures as an opportunity to recognize that their rationalization of reform mismatches the experiences of those who are most affected.
The social groups that are closer to the poverty line, including the out-of-towner students, witness the severity of the austerity measures and budget cuts the most. They do not have the luxury to make sense of the reform policies made by the political elites who control all the means and measures of life in the Region's posher neighborhoods.
Instead of relying on their political will and the vast network of party loyalists, KRG leaders need to approach a progressive policy framework with appropriate tools that are equitable towards the disenfranchised communities.
Policymakers must also understand that, regardless of intent and political will, their reform policies must accommodate for the institutional inertia in the KRG. To implement reform policies, KRG agencies will rely on their stagnated bureaucracy and limited institutional capabilities. This accommodation often contradicts the rationale behind the reform initiatives.
It is necessary that policymakers invite the agencies that implement reform into the policymaking processes so that policy and implementation correspond with each other. Instead of relying on micromanaging as the ultimate policy tool, policymaking should focus on incentives and capacity building as integral components of reform to cut dependency on political meddling.
Unless reform efforts transcend mere rhetoric, the social and political unrest, alongside waves of migrating youth who are willing to face starvation, cold, and even death on foreign borders just to leave the country, will likely continue. Reforming the stagnant culture of dependency on the public sector is also futile unless the regulatory attitudes interlaced with the political competition and maneuvering that currently shape the private sector in the Region are radically addressed.
The KRG's leadership must also realize that educational policy should support reform in the academic institutions even if this reform is at the expense of political loss for those who are currently in power. If political and government leaders are unwilling to pay the students their stipend, their alternative is to bring about a robust educational reform.
Abdurrahman A. Wahab is a policy researcher at the Institute of Regional and International Studies (IRIS), based at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani.
