My Say
Of Pigs and Parliaments
Democracy And Traditional Leadership Systems Are Still Coming To Terms Around The Region
Some peculiar events in Vanuatu appear to bear out the persistent contention by some of the Pacific’s political leaders that the Western form of democratic government adopted by their countries isn’t necessarily the only desirable form of democracy.
Vanuatu in August came close to, if not quite a coup, then something that was not that remote from being one.
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A tussle over the appointment of a new police force commissioner brought the elected government into a confrontation with the police force and what supposedly is a para-military arm of the police, but is now virtually a small army.
Pigs have an important place in Vanuatu’s culture. They have a value, and an exchange of pigs between the belligerent parties settled the crisis. Vanuatu returned to its normal calm.
May it remain so.
Motarilavoa Hilda Lini, director of Pacific Concerns Resource Center, and a former Vanuatu parliamentarian, whose brother was Vanuatu’s first Prime Minister, commented memorably, and with justification: “History has shown that constitutional governance, Western judiciary and Western legal procedures do not always have the capacity to deal with people’s energy and determination, when their conscience is clear that they are defending what is right, either by nature or by law.”
In Fiji, at an August Common-wealth Prime Ministers’ roundtable meeting to discuss the challenges of democracy in the Pacific, the Samoan Prime Minister, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, among the most able and successful of Pacific leaders, argued that there is a need to review democracy in the Pacific, taking account of the region’s cultures and traditions.
He feels that the democratic principles on which Pacific Islands governments are founded are inadequate. He believes these to be mainly related to the minimal or non-inclusion of traditional forms of governance in the formal constitutions adopted in the region. Long before colonization, he recalled, Island places had their own forms of governance, which were not incorporated into written constitutions at the time of independence.
The Fiji Prime Minister, Laisenia Qarase, who owes his tenure of office to the removal of the previous elected government by a coup, is a vocal advocate of the contention that the Pacific should turn to useful indigenous customary forms of democracy and tailor these to meet the needs of modern governance. Everywhere in the Pacific, traditional forms of leadership and conflict resolution exist side-by-side with constitutional procedures and, as in the recent incident in Vanuatu, they are often more effective.
In the Pacific, the power of chiefly systems is waning, and this is the trend which will ultimately make democracy paramount in the Pacific Islands. How Western or indigenous a form it will take, only time will tell, but it will be what people want.
