Action and Reaction
Saturday, August 15th, 2009The increasing – but certainly not intractable – tension that exists between the traditional and modern economies needs to be reconciled. Before that can happen, though, a great deal more research will be required.
The process of understanding will be a messy, decidedly un-scientific affair. While Vanuatu’s economic managers have made great strides in systematising their economic analysis, their tools and metrics just don’t translate usefully into the custom economy. While the movement of cash can ultimately be tracked as closely as time and resources allow, the same cannot reasonably be said about the often intangible inputs and outputs of the kastom economy.
It’s one thing to draw up a spreadsheet of VAT revenues per sector and use them to extrapolate domestic business activity. It’s another thing entirely to track the movement of mats and yams between families and to infer from them the potential for employment stability brought about by renewed alliances.
Begging the Question
Saturday, August 8th, 2009At the recently completed Pacific Islands Forum in Cairns, leaders stood solemnly together and released a communiqué touting their commitment “to eradicating [sexual and gender based violence] and to ensure that all individuals have equal protection and access to justice.”
There’s an entire section in the communiqué devoted to what they coyly call SGBV. It dwells on the importance of international coordination, on continuing to maintain regional efforts to raise awareness… and of course remaining sensitive at all times to local culture and ‘differing contexts’ within the various nations.
Here’s a context I wish would differ: I wish that the young woman who greeted me at one of Vila’s marquee stores didn’t have a bruise on her jaw that had ‘left hook’ written all over it. She was at least seven months pregnant. I wish that another young acquaintance who had just given birth only days before didn’t continue to suffer through daily beatings. I wish the waitress who serves my coffee didn’t keep showing up with a black eye every month or so.
I wish the scars, the bruises, the broken teeth and bones weren’t so much part of our ‘differing context’ that we just tut-tut solemnly when we see them and carry on with our day.
A Second Flowering
Sunday, July 26th, 2009Lilly Lui wants women’s rights to bloom again as they did in the heady days following Independence. The sole female candidate in the upcoming Efate North bye-election, she has been entrusted by women throughout rural Efate to voice their concerns on the national stage.
Fragments
Friday, June 19th, 2009In a society without institutions, family is all we have. If we have no family, then we have nothing at all. And that, according to reports I’ve recently received, is precisely the situation that one young woman is facing today.
The details are sketchy at best, and possibly incorrect in some regards, but the story is heart-breaking: A young woman defies her family and marries without approval. When the marriage turns rocky, she and her son are turned out of their home. In punishment for her willfulness, her family won’t take her back. Bereft, she takes to sleeping in parks, cadging food where she can, eating only after her son has fed.
If there’s a silver lining to this story, it’s the display of common Christian kindness shown by so many in the tale as it was told to me. Good Samaritans have given her money, food and even short-term shelter. One woman, barren herself, even offered to adopt her unborn child.
A New Page
Monday, May 18th, 2009There’s been a lot of concern of late over the apparent impatience shown by Australia and New Zealand to engage with their Pacific Island neighbours on the PACER Plus round of trade talks. Local commentators have had little good to say about the prospects, and speculation has been rife over what’s really at stake.
The strongest fear expressed by commentators throughout the Pacific is that New Zealand and Australia will use their foreign aid to the region as a stick to bring the small island states into line. Having witnessed the drubbing that Fiji and PNG took in their Economic Partnership Agreements with the European Union, it’s understandable that they wouldn’t want to see their economic health similarly threatened.
This week, Pablo Kang, Australia’s new High Commissioner to Vanuatu, published a surprisingly intemperate letter to the Editor in this newspaper. He was rightly chastised for the distinctly un-Melanesian tone he took in confronting nay-sayers. Vanuatu has spent years assiduously cultivating a cordial, solidly two-way engagement with its development partners that allows it to assert its own priorities. This week’s pronouncements reminded some of a repeat from the Howard/Downer show.
But, lest the baby exit with the bath water, it needs to be said that one key observation that High Commissioner Kang shared with us in undoubtedly true: As things stand right now, PACER Plus is still a blank page.
Damage
Friday, May 1st, 2009The presence recently of Sulu Censors (so called for the skirt-like traditional dress many of them wear) in all television, radio and print media outlets has largely neutered Fiji’s traditional media. But the flow of information has simply found a route around this ‘damage’. In recent weeks, Fijians at home and abroad have flocked en masse to the Internet to get their fix of national and local news, uncensored by the Bainimarama regime.
Countless blogs have sprung up like flowers across the Internet in reaction to the media crackdown. With names like Coup Four and a Half, Fiji Coup and Fiji Uncensored, they’ve made their raison d’etre clear. While a few leave no doubt that they have very particular axes to grind, the majority are replete with well-sourced, insightful news, commentary and analysis.
No News is Bad News
Friday, April 17th, 2009With headlines like ‘Man Gets On Bus’, and ‘Breakfast As Usual’, Fiji’s beleaguered fourth estate is reporting all the news it feels is still fit – or safe – to print. Such stories are a reaction to Commodore Frank Bainimarama’s extensive power grab this week, which included the abrogation of the national Constitution, removal of judges and senior financial figures, expulsion of Australian and New Zealand-born journalists and censorship of domestic media.
In solidarity with my Fijian colleagues, I’ve decided to write about nothing as well. Happily, this is easily done. Even though Port Vila is home to the Melanesian Spearhead Group and PM Edward Nipake Natapei holds the chair this year, I am glad to say that I have nothing to report.
A Nation of Laws
Saturday, April 4th, 2009Shortly before noon on Sunday, March 29, two Toyota pickup trucks arrived at a Malapoa residence occupied by 21 year old escaped convict John Bule, his girlfriend and their daughter, aged less than 2. Several men in plain clothes dismounted and entered the house in search of Bule.
Loud voices were heard from within the house, and 3 shots were fired, apparently as a warning. Nobody was hurt. Shortly afterward, John and his girlfriend were escorted from the house, their hands bound behind their back. They were placed together in the back of one truck and driven to the VMF barracks.
The girlfriend later recalled that she pleaded with those holding her to be allowed to return to her home and her daughter. She told them she’d done nothing wrong.
As she pled with them, she says, she heard her boyfriend John crying out in pain in an adjacent room.
Shortly before 2:00 p.m. that same day, authorities brought John Bule to Vila Central Hospital for treatment of wounds to both legs, both arms, his ribs, back and head, which had multiple lacerations, including a gash above his left eye about 10 cm. long and 3 cm. wide.
Soon after 4:00 p.m. Sunday, John Bule was pronounced dead.
The Price of Democracy
Monday, March 23rd, 2009As I write this, Vanuatu’s members of Parliament are plodding through the Government’s budget bill. It’s an unusual second consecutive week of work for our MPs, and though everyone is intent on seeing the job completed, they’re giving the work the attention it deserves.
Opposition members have kept cabinet ministers on their collective toes. Following a salvo of incisive questions from across the floor, Finance Minister Molisa sent his staff back to the Ministry with instructions for more detailed briefing materials. The lights were burning into the small hours at Finance.
Measured in strictly procedural terms, progress may be slower than Speaker George Wells might want, but the Opposition, looking revitalised and with a newfound sense of purpose, has been… well, doing its job, to be frank. That’s a refreshing – and timely – first.
Counterpoint
Sunday, March 1st, 2009Picture Kalori, a young man of rank and potential in the 1970s, watching his fathers become isolated and shifted out of power, while young, foreign-educated firebrands radioed political speeches from hiding places in the bush only a few kilometres from his nasara.
The young lawyer who preached, Castro-like, over the bush radio is now President of Vanuatu. Chief Kalori remains in his village, very much the injured lion. He is quick to reprove the country’s founders, men he – not entirely without reason – considered under-educated and ill-prepared for the demands of ruling a newborn nation.
While Kalori is alive, there will be another view of Independence: not undesirable, but in the 1980s untimely and rash. He feels that everything that has transpired since then, the venality, pettiness, lack of political coherence or cohesion… all of this can be laid at the feet of some brash young men who lacked the education and the wisdom to take a more patient tack.
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