Cover Story
Corruption
Pacific cure urgently needed. But don’t hold your breath.
A World Bank definition of corruption is the “abuse of public office for personal gain”. Corruption in Pacific Islands governments began flaring in the 1980s and 1990s. By the standards of Africa and Asia, not to mention the Americas and Europe, it is small cheese.
It still is not quite so generally pervasive that it is impossible to visit any government department or ministry, without leaving a dollar or two, or more, in a hand extended under the table.
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But in some countries - Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Nauru and Fiji - stories of individual cases of corruption have grown to be dealings not costing just a mere few hundred thousand dollars but hundreds of millions of them.
Corruption has grown to a stage where two Pacific Islands states, the Solomon Islands and Nauru, have been reduced to extreme parlous financial, economic and social plights.
Corruption was such a significant factor in the coup in Fiji of 2000 that it destroyed democracy.
A Fiji newspaper, the Fiji Sun, reported that in a leaked report of an investigation by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, bribery by American businesspeople who wanted to get their hands on a mahogany concession, was a major cause of the 2000 coup.
Some regional officials familiar with the ins and outs of the US$2 billion Pacific Islands tuna fishing business say there can be no doubt that high-level bribery influences the award of fishing licences to some foreign fishing fleets.
Two years ago, the then Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, Sir Mekere Morauta lamented that corruption in his country was so deep and widespread that the nation’s entire security was undermined by it.
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Last year, Morauta, a former Papua New Guinea Central Bank governor who tried to curb corruption and restore failing government institutions and the economy, lost power. His downfall was engineered by politicians whose personal interests were threatened by his anti-corruption policies. Not a single one of the Pacific’s 22 independent states and remaining French and American territories are free of corruption, although some microcosms like Tuvalu are still but lightly touched by it.
Extraordinary tales of corruption in Papua New Guinea that made major political figures, including at least one prime minister multimillionaires, are in league by themselves. They are beginning to be matched by tales from the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji.
Some tales are ludicrous, like Vanuatu’s US$175-million mighty ruby, weighing at more than 70 kilos, the world’s largest, an Asian confidence trickster assured then prime minister Barak Sope.
Sope’s gullibility, but also culpability, led him to a brief spell in jail until last December when he was released, much to the fury and disgust of the government, on the orders of the country’s extraordinarily sympathetic president.
Opening the new Papua New Guinea Parliament last August, Governor-General Sir Silas Atopare, in an unusually blunt speech, said corruption was one of the most significant factors in reducing five million Papua New Guineans to enduring one of the world’s lowest standards of living. Politicians had to lead by example and “shed the corruption tag on leaders,” he said.
In a caustic column, journalist Kevin Pamba of The National newspaper wrote in 2001 that it was no wonder elderly Papua New Guineans nostalgically recalled the days when the Australian colonial government was an assurance of fair and honest rule. If so many of Papua New Guinea’s politicians weren’t crooks “we would not be on our knees seeking help from international financial houses like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF),” he wrote.
Everywhere in Papua New Guinea the elderly spoke of the “good old ‘taim blong masta’ (days of the Australians)”. They talk about the enviable work ethics and management ethos of the Australian public servants posted across the then territory of Papua and New Guinea.
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“Our time contrasts starkly with the era that our elders recall. Ours is an era where we have grown used to living with vocabularies like corruption, mismanagement, nepotism, vote buying, votes of no confidence, slackness, incompetence, lack of this and that and so forth.
“When the Australians left in 1975, they thought they were leaving behind locals capable of following in their footsteps and managing the country they had established just as well as they did. But it was a serious miscalculation as it is now evident, 26 years on.
“One immediate point to assess ourselves is by asking why we continuously send to Parliament self-serving scumbags and daylight robbers just because they are our wantoks or belong to the tribe next door that has ‘Moka dinau’ with our tribe.”
Some elderly Fiji Islanders are equally nostalgic about the days of British colonial rule.
Papua New Guinea is the only Pacific Island country with an effective anti-corruption institution in the form of a powerful investigative Ombudsman Commission. It makes powerful politicians tremble.
Vanuatu has an Ombudsman’s office that has produced nearly a hundred damning reports on prime ministers, cabinet ministers and senior public officials, many of them still in office. But there’s been only one serious prosecution of a major politician, that of Barak Sope in 2002.
The Solomon Islands has a lightweight Ombudsman’s office. The Fiji Ombudsman office achieves a little more than a smidgeon of justice for the victims of bureaucratic idiocies. That’s the way politicians like to keep it, although the present government of Laisenia Qarase has indicated it is inclined to accept the institution of an anti-corruption office.
Talking to the annual Fiji Prosecutors Conference last December, Papua New Guinea’s Director of Public Prosecutions, Chronox Manek said that a former Chief Ombudsman, Simon Pentanu, now administrator of Bougainville Islands, often remarked that if the Ombudsman’s office hadn’t been established at independence “there is no way we would have one today.” For Papua New Guinea to be without one now “is such a frightening thought that it does not bear thinking of,” Manek said.
The prosecutors’ conference declared that corruption had become “a particularly pernicious phenomenon” and that Fiji should establish an independent commission against corruption modelled on Papua New Guinea and New South Wales’ commissions.
The high cost of such a commission would be outweighed by the cost of corruption to the economic and moral fabric of Fiji’s society and should not be an excuse for not establishing one, the prosecutors declared. Melanesia is notorious as the Pacific’s most fertile ground for massive corruption, usually centering on the bribery of political and public service leaders by foreign exploiters of Melanesia’s forest, mineral and fisheries wealth.
But in Melanesia, exposure by local newspapers throughout the Pacific Islands, now virtually the last bulwark against corruption, has been a vital factor in blocking it from becoming unrestrained.
In Polynesia and Micronesia, corruption is somewhat less obvious, partly because these regions don’t have the economic magnets Melanesia has, and partly because the watchdog role of the local press is less developed. Exposure in the two regions is less likely, remarks Professor Ron Crocombe, an acerbic academic investigator of and commentator on Pacific Islands affairs, in the latest edition of his book, The South Pacific, because “politeness would preclude such disclosures” and because “connivance and corruption may be entrenched at the top”.
In Samoa, however, cabinet-level corruption in 1999 led to the murder of one minister on the order of two other cabinet ministers and the firebombing of the office of Sano Malifa, editor of the Samoa Observer, who has had his muckraking exposes recognised with major international journalism awards. In the Cook Islands, corruption centred on the international borrowing of tens of millions of dollars for the construction of a large resort hotel that has still to be completed, was an undeniable factor in the country’s economic collapse.
Three of French Polynesia’s presidents, Gaston Flosse, Jean Juventin and Alexandre Leontieff, have been implicated in corruption. Leontieff was jailed for it, but was recently restored to public office by Flosse, while Flosse was recently cleared of some old charges against him.
Some current relevant matters of note are:
· In Papua New Guinea in November a Commission of Inquiry reported on the causes of a 153 million Kina reduction in the value of its National Provident Fund. It recommended the prosecution of, among others, the fund’s chairperson, Jimmy Maladina, now living very comfortably in Australia.· In the Northern Mariana Islands, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation in December charged the vice president of the Senate, Jose M. Della Cruz and another senator, Ricardo Atalig, with conspiracy to commit fraud. The two have denied the charges.
· In Palau, the present governor of Ngardmau is pressing for leniency in the way of returning stolen money and a probation for a former governor, Albert Ngarmekur, who was impeached on 16 counts of misconduct, 14 counts of forgery, 9 counts of cheating, seven counts of grand larceny and five counts of embezzlement.
· In Fiji, the government in recent months has admitted serious corruption affecting the issue of fishing licences to foreign fishermen; it has accused senior agricultural officials including a permanent secretary, of wrongly handling F$18.34 million (US$9 million) in giving out suspiciously priced agricultural tools and materials to Fijian villagers. It has been counter-charged with using the money to buy votes during the 2001 election.
A major local construction company has queried the award of an airport construction contract it says could be completed for F$7 million less than the accepted quote.
The new immigration department head has committed himself to erasing the corrupt issue of passports to Asian buyers.
The government has resisted calls for inquiries into a F$240-million (US$120 million) national bank scandal and into the identities, alleged to include some prominent businessmen, of instigators of the 2000 coup.
From the mid 1990s some of the Pacific’s aid donors, notably Australia, have singled out corruption as a factor affecting aid decisions. A trend now is to channel aid, particularly cash, to non-government organisations rather than channel it to governments only to see it channelled to private pockets.
The Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat’s Secretary-General, Noel Levi told a regional meeting of the anti-corruption organisation, Transparency International in July 2001, that corruption in the Pacific Islands causes gross misuse of power and resources, significant economic losses, loss of civil liberties, challenges to governments and civil unrest. “Some of these are evident in the challenge last year (2000) to the legitimacy of the democratically elected governments of the Solomon Islands and Fiji.”
Levi warned that similar situations “are simmering in other member countries of the Forum which have the potential to erupt unless appropriate corrective measures are taken now.”
Bribery, nepotism and perversion was widespread in the Pacific and hampered economic growth, he said. “Most importantly, however, these sorts of corruption are entirely within our control. Even if we cannot control global economic forces, typhoons or malaria, we can make our political systems transparent, accountable and fair - we can have good governance - and we can all enjoy the benefits.”
Since 1996, meetings of the Forum Leaders’ annual summit, the Forum Economic Ministers Meeting (FEMM) and numerous regional meetings at lesser levels have accepted recommendations and plans for at least diluting corruption, including the adoption by the 1997 Forum summit of “Eight Principles of Accountability.”
Now the Forum Secretariat complains that few Pacific Islands governments are meeting commitments to those cleansing principles. Some haven’t got the manpower to do so. Others lack the political will. Too many of their politicians are on the take.
Since early 2001, Australia has been engaged in Papua New Guinea in a 7.4 million Kina project to strengthen the police force’s fraud and anti-corruption squad to fight corruption in government and business. Assistance included a full-time legal adviser and a forensic accountant.
At its Suva headquarters, the Forum Secretariat’s Legal Services Division is engaged on drafting a code of conduct for Pacific government leaders. It hopes to have it ready for consideration for adoption by this year’s Forum summit, due to be held in New Zealand in August. It is heavily based on Papua New Guinea’s tough leadership code, which has been the downfall of some of its senior politicians, although not nearly enough of them.
The Forum can be expected to make a fine show of accepting it. How far individual countries will go in implementing them will be food for skepticism.
