My Say
Rascals pure and simple
Corruption Can Become A Way Of Life
Corruption is being pushed to the fore as an issue that afflicts the management of Pacific Island governments. It is not a new issue, but its effects are now lamentably obvious in the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Nauru.
The push emanates from some aid donors, notably Australia and New Zealand, by branches of the anti-corruption movement Transparency International that have been established in Papua New Guinea and Fiji and by some prominent regional personalities like the Vice Chancellor of the University of the South Pacific, Savenaca Siwatibau.
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The former Papua New Guinea Prime Minister, Sir Mekere Morauta, is on record as declaring that corruption could destroy his country.
No country is free of corruption as it affects government, nor will it ever be.
Even in Australia, mainly at state government level, corruption tales abound. Nearly all African governments are rife with it and it is a way of life throughout Asia, the Arab world, South America and Russia. Some Western governments allow bribes to be counted as an export business tax deduction. In France very high-level corruption is a fashion and in Britain it is the meat of satirical magazines.
None of the corruption perpetrated in other regions of the world should be of any comfort to the Pacific Islands, but as a feature of the way things are in the Islands it has some distinguishing peculiarities to do with culture and tradition.
Corruption is a blatantly obvious feature of Melanesian governments but less so, certainly to outsiders, in Polynesia and Micronesia. To a degree, and to what degree is a matter of opinion, Pacific Island leaders are inheritors of a culture in which chiefs have an accepted personal proprietary view of what they have domain over. Everything they see is theirs to be used as such and no questions asked. Woe betide questioners.
There is no doubt that this attitude has filtered into the conduct of Western styles of government adopted by the Pacific Islands since they began escaping from colonial rule in the 1960s. Numerous heads of governments were, or are, traditional chiefs and exploited their election as presidents or prime ministers to take their personal bits of the action. This has had a trickle down affect.
In their endeavors as democratically-elected leaders, not all politicians have been rascals. To give them their due, most were genuine in their efforts to put their countries on the road to good democratic governance, but bad old autocratic influences couldn’t but help seep through.
A test of this assertion would be to value the personal and family assets controlled by such leaders at the outset of their political careers compared with what they had on their retirement, or death. Names can easily and accurately be named, but on occasion it is better not to speak, or write, ill of the dead or those who are still living.
The trend now, however, is that rotten leaders are rascals pure and simple. They need to be excised from office, prosecuted, jailed for long terms, stripped of their obviously ill-gotten assets and barred from ever again holding public office. But this may be too much to hope for, especially in countries with forgiving heads of state.
Robert Keith-Reid is publisher of Islands Business. He can be reached at: Rkeith-reid@ibi.com.fj
