Ayham Sameraei may have drawn the most unenviable job in the new Iraqi caretaker government. The 52-year-old U.S.-educated engineer is the minister of electricity, charged with getting the country’s feeble power grid functioning smoothly.
But Sameraei — like many of the newly minted Iraqi ministers who took up or resumed their duties Wednesday, a day after the interim government was appointed — says it is the American occupiers who bear the responsibility for his success or failure.
“Everyone says our country can’t have security without electricity,” he said, leaning back in a chair in his office in the capital’s heavily guarded Ministry of Oil complex.
“Well, that’s true. But if you don’t have security, you can’t generate electricity. And the Americans must provide that,” Sameraei added.
Some of the skeptics of the coalition’s effort to hand over power to Iraqis inhabit the smoke-filled halls of the various ministries. To them, the interim government is as emblematic of old problems as of new beginnings.
“I told the Americans, `You are giving us a hell and telling us to make it a heaven,”‘ said Sameraei, who like eight of the other newly appointed ministers already has served in his temporary post for nearly nine months.
Sameraei spent his first day as part of the new government in typical fashion, monitoring the power grid’s output of megawatts, which as usual crept upward and then fell frustratingly back, triggering widespread power cuts that left thousands of angry citizens sweltering.
Sameraei called it a relatively good day on the electricity front: three hours on, three hours off.
The lack of power and the mounting heat gave many ministry workers an excuse to slip away from their desks by mid-afternoon.
