“It was decided to postpone the general population census due to a delay in the budget approval, as the current half of the year has ended without approving it,” Abdul-Zahra al-Hindawi, spokesperson for Iraq’s Ministry of Planning, told Rudaw’s Mushtaq Ramadhan. “We need financial allocations to cover the population census.
Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani earlier this year tasked the planning ministry to conduct the population census by the end of the year. However, the ministry responded and said that it needed 15 months to conduct the country’s census – the first to be held in 26 years.
“There are infrastructures and requirements that need a period of time, so in light of the lack of approval of the budget, it has become impossible to complete all these requirements within the remaining six months of the current year,” Hindawi added.
A recent row between Kurdish and Iraqi parties in the parliament has prevented the legislature from passing the much-needed federal budget bill. The parliament was scheduled to convene last Saturday to vote on the bill, but the session was postponed indefinitely.
The issue arose when the finance committee in the Iraqi parliament amended two articles that relate to the Kurdistan Region, prompting Erbil to slam the amendments as “unconstitutional,” labeling them as a violation of previously agreed upon between Erbil and Baghdad.
Iraq has not conducted a full census since 1987. Its latest one, in 1997, counted 19 million Iraqis, but it excluded the Kurdistan Region. A separate count put the population of the three Kurdish provinces at 2.8 million.
According to Hindawi, the census will count close to 43 million Iraqis by October 2024.
A new census was planned for 2020, but it was postponed to November 2022 due to the coronavirus pandemic.
In 2022, then-Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi’s cabinet took a decision to hold an “electronic national population census”, in the final quarter of this year.
Iraq has been discussing carrying out a new census for years that should contribute to the resolution of historical problems like Baathist-era Arabization, the status of disputed Kirkuk, which is claimed by both the federal Iraqi government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), and the size of the KRG’s share of federal funds.
Political instability in Iraq left the country devoid of a budget law in 2022, which jeopardized the oil-dependent economy with Baghdad unable from taking advantage of soaring oil prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to combat poverty and bring much-needed economic stability.
