Baghdad (IraqiNews.com) – Prominent Iraqi economic expert Manar Al-Obeidi has warned of an impending demographic crisis facing the nation’s leadership, cautioning that a looming human time bomb could soon see millions of unemployed youth taking to the streets in widespread protests demanding jobs.
In a televised interview with journalist Muna Sami, Al-Obeidi grounded his warning in demographic findings from the Ministry of Planning’s recent nationwide census, which registered Iraq’s population at 47 million people and revealed that nearly half of the country is under the age of 25, while active participants in the workforce account for just 30 percent.
Al-Obeidi emphasized that over the next five to ten years, this massive youth cohort will reach prime working age, creating an unprecedented wave of job seekers that the public sector cannot absorb.
With state payrolls already saturated, federal institutions will have zero fiscal or administrative capacity to offer additional civil service appointments unless the government enacts radical economic restructuring to build productive industrial lines and real production capacities.
Consequently, Al-Obeidi argued, an inability to accommodate these incoming labor cohorts will inevitably trigger widespread social unrest as youth exercise their legitimate right to demand viable livelihoods.
Compounding this looming crisis is a structural paradox within the domestic economy: despite high unemployment figures, private-sector enterprises face chronic talent deficits.
Al-Obeidi observed that nearly every private firm, including his own organization, struggles to recruit qualified local personnel because the traditional public education system fails to equip graduates with modern, market-relevant competencies.
This systemic failure places accountability squarely on the Ministries of Education and Higher Education, whose outputs remain disconnected from private industry demands.
Under standard economic models, every one-percent expansion in a specific sector’s gross domestic product typically generates a two-percent rise in corresponding job opportunities.
However, Al-Obeidi pointed out that in Iraq, economic expansion frequently bypasses domestic labor entirely due to this widening skill deficit. In the booming residential real estate and construction sectors, developers have repeatedly turned to Egyptian, Turkish, and Iranian firms and laborers to fill operational needs, underscoring an acute domestic shortage of skilled technical talent capable of matching the execution standards required by modern infrastructure projects.
