Iraq open for business

01 Feb 2016 | Admin Author

Iraqi ambassador to South Africa, Dr Hisham al Alawi, says there's been a significant improvement in the security situation in his country over the past five years.

Al Alawi was in Nelson Mandela Bay on Friday at the invitation of the Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber to speak to local business about opportunities in his country.

"I am glad to say that in the past five years there has been a significant improvement in the security environment in Iraq. We've had significant reduction in attacks, incidences and casualties," he said.

"In the past four years the official Iraqi figures, or the UN figures or the British body count figures, show that the total number of incidences of people killed on injured in Iraq has gone down significantly to something between 2645 to around 4500 compares to the most difficult years, 2005/6/7 where the total number of people killed reached around 16 000 to 17000."

"There are still challenges there. We see isolated attacks every now and then but for the average person who is interested in visiting Iraq for tourism, cultural or business reasons, the environment is generally a safe environment. Obviously, you have to take common sense precautions as you do wherever you go," said Al Alawi.

"The Iraqi economy has been one of the top 10 fastest growing economies in the past three to four years. The figures from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank also show that the Iraqi economy is likely to continue to grow by an average of nine to 10 percent in the next five to 10 years."

"Together with that we have seen a significant increase in the Iraqi annual budget, the GDP with a significant reduction in poverty and unemployment rates from around 50 percent to around 15 to 18 percent last year," he added.

"There is a new strategy announced by the government which aims to reduce poverty and unemployment further to less than 10 percent in the next five years. We feel very optimistic about achieving that given our success in the past years. And, the two key challenges were are trying to address are diversifying the economy, using some of the revenue we get from exporting crude oil on investing in other sectors (of the economy)."

"The second challenge is to continue to encourage the growth of the private sector. And that would help us to achieve our very ambitious targets of reducing unemployment (and) poverty rates further to less than 10 percent", said Al Alawi.

He told Algoa FM News that business opportunities for South African companies is not just in the energy sector.

"The two countries signed an important agreement on bilateral economic (and) technical cooperation in November last year. Our minister of trade came here with a big delegation, had a good meeting with (Trade and Industry Minister) Rob Davis. In this agreement 12 key sectors have been mentioned. One of them is the energy sector but the other key sectors also mentioned are electricity production, agriculture, water resource management, housing, transportation, telecommunications, health-care, tourism."