My Say
Aid and Good Goverance
Will more Terror-Inspired aid money get us any closer to accountability in Pacific governments?
It is no surprise that the specter of the Pacific Islands becoming launching pads for attacks aimed at the United States—or other targets—has been raised.
The topic surfaced at meetings of both the U.S./Pacific Islands Joint Commercial Commission and of the Pacific Islands Conference of (some) Leaders Standing Committee. Both groups met in Honolulu in March.
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A measure of the commission’s activity level is the fact that its trade and investment working group last met in 1999. An official from the U.S. state department’s Pacific Islands office mentioned that since it thought all the Islands were vulnerable to terrorism the U.S. would “hopefully”—only his hope, presumably—maintain and even increase its level of engagement in the region.
What this means is a moot point. Discounting what it is reluctantly contracted to pay its Micronesian vassal states for the privilege of retaining military control over them, U.S. “engagement” with Oceania’s independent island states is a crumb compared with what is delivered by the European Union, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and now China.
In the mid-1980s, the U.S. decided that the risk of feared bogeymen like the Russians, Cubans and Libyans, appearing in the Pacific had dwindled to insignificance . It then cut its measly allocation to the Pacific Islands to next to nothing.
Now there are hints that what happened last September in Washington and New York has aroused a modicum of renewed American interest in the islands. Clearly, the possibility of the use of such airports as Nadi, Rarotonga or Apia as portals for the seizure of a U.S. –bound aircraft cannot be ignored. Such a seizure could convert an airliner to become a guided missile for a ghastly assault on targets on the U.S. West Coast, or Honolulu.
The state department official referred to airport and seaport security concerns. Another matter the U.S. is nagging the Islands about concerns suspicions about the exploitation of the international financial services by white collar criminals.
Along with other rich members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S. has been worried about the amount of criminal money in the Pacific, which is nowhere near the floods flowing through other portals—toward which the OECD turns a blind eye. Another moot point.
If Pacific Island leaders hope that September 11 inspired enough paranoia to prompt the U.S. to turn a torrent of money on for them, they are hoping in vain. The record of significant U.S. aid for the really poor of the world is not inspiring; billions for arms for countries in which it has a strategic interest and conditional dribbles for areas outside those interests.
In the Pacific Islands the record is not remarkable at all. But then, why should it be? Neither the Russians, nor the Cubans, nor the Libyans ever really arrived here.
And are Pacific Islanders as destitute and helpless as they like to make out? For that matter, do Pacific Islanders need bid dollops of Amer-ican money? Don’t we get more than enough from all those other far more generous, and less string attaching, donors? Isn’t it correct that most, if not all recipients of those flows have difficulty absorbing it, for one reason or another?
International development institutions harp on the fact that, measured per head, the Pacific Islands collect more aid than any other developing region. In one of those mysterious Pacific phenomena, there seems extraordinarily little evidence of the islands benefiting from all this aid.
This is partly because few of Oceania’s states have sufficient skilled manpower, infrastructure or planning abilities to turn aid money into concrete effective good works with the speed and efficiency donors unrealistically expect.
At last this is being recognized and being allowed for. But there is another reason why there’s no great need for descending showers of U.S. dollars, for whatever motive they might be delivered. The first development challenge that confronts Pacific Island leaders is to clean up their personal acts. This is what donors really mean nowadays when they harp on the need for what they call “good governance.”
By that, they mean use of the money by an honest, reasonably efficient and effective government. As the affairs of many of Oceania’s governments demonstrate, there is a long, hard road to travel before the desirable objective of good governance will be reached.
—Contact Robert Keith-Reid at: rkeithreid@ibi.com.fj
