Last summer, Khalid Payenda was overseeing a $6 billion budget. Now, just seven months later, he drives a. Uber.
Payenda, the former finance minister of Afghanistan, drives a Honda Accord in Washington DC to support his his wife and four children.
The ex-politician resigned days before Kabul fell to the Taliban and then moved to the US amid safety concerns.
Payenda now around earns £115 for a six-hour Uber shift and uses its as a supplement to the £1,520 he earns per semester from teaching at Georgetown University.
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“It’s like a part of my life is a story someone else told me and that I have not lived,” he said, as per the Washington Post.
“It eats at you inside. Right now, I don’t have any place. I don’t belong here, and I don’t belong there. It’s a very empty feeling.”
As a Uber driver, he revealed that he would often pick up 'drunk customers', some of which would 'cursed so much' but would often give the best tips.
“I have seen a lot of sadness and hollowness,” he said, "people who work hard all week so they can go get wasted."
With regards to leaving his post as a politician, Payenda blames Afghan leaders as well as the Trump and Biden administrations for causing the dramatic collapse and continuing difficulties that face Afghanistan today.
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Shortly after the fall of Kabul, on social media he wrote: "Now that it’s over, we had 20 years and the whole world’s support to build a system that would work for the people. We miserably failed.
"All we built was a house of cards that came down crashing this fast. A house of cards built on the foundation of corruption.
"Some of us in the government chose to steal even when we had a slim, last chance. We betrayed our people."
He says that the Afghan government was excluded from the peace settlement negotiations between the Trump administration and the Taliban, and in his mind, that was a crushing blow.
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“Maybe there were good intentions initially, but the United States probably didn’t mean this,” he told the Post.
“It’s outrageous. This is the single biggest blow you can deliver to the Afghan economy. The Afghani would be a worthless, dirty old piece of paper if you don’t have the assets to back it up.”
Former president Ghani also left the country amid the Taliban takeover, and has now moved to the United Arab Emirates.
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Topics: Uber, World News