Politics
New President, New Speaker Appointed
Political deadlock now over
The March 10 death of President Bernard Dowiyogo ended a two-month-long political deadlock in Nauru.
Dowiyogo’s death in the United States capital, Washington, after an emergency heart operation, changed political balances in the hung 18-member Nauru parliament. It brought about the election of a new Speaker and avoided an imminent dissolution, according to a Nauruan political observer.
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MP Derog Gioura took over as acting president and a few days later another MP, Ross Caine, agreed to become Speaker.
Without these developments the absence of a president would have brought about the almost immediate automatic dissolution of Parliament.
That would have landed the country in another constitutional predicament since if no MP had agreed to fill the empty seat of the Speaker, there would have been no one with the constitutional authority to issue election writs.
With Caine in place, Nauru’s government, near the point of economic collapse due to debt and mismanagement, was placed able to stagger on until April 8, when the life of the present parliament is due to expire and preparations for a general election can begin.
Dowiyogo became president for the sixth time in January after his predecessor, Rene Harris, was removed by a no confidence vote.
But the new president was unable to get a 2003 budget passed and a row in which no MP would assume the vacant post of Speaker left parliament paralysed.
Dowiyogo, who was a diabetic and who had a heart surgery in Australia in 2001, collapsed with more heart trouble in Washington.
He was there dealing with United States threats to hit Nauru with reprisals unless it did more to close down what the Americans claimed were criminal money laundering conduits provided by Nauru international finance centre.
Dowiyogo, of Nauru, was born at Nauru in 1946 and trained in Australia as a lawyer. He wasn’t in fact a Nauruan since his father was a Japanese army officer, while his mother came from Kiribati. He first became an elected member of the 18-seat Parliament in 1973. As leader of an informally structured political agitation group that became known as the Nauru Party, he was able to oust Nauru’s head chief and first president, Hammer DeRoburt, who had won independence for Nauru from Australia in 1968.
Dowiyogo served his first term as president from 1976-78 but was quickly ousted by DeRoburt.
Dowiyogo then became DeRoburt’s justice minister until the veteran’s final fall from power in 1989 over a no confidence vote.
Dowiyogo, who like all of Nauru’s politicians, relies for power chiefly on votes from his large extended family, regained the presidency in a December 1989 election.
In subsequent years as Nauru’s politics fractured into brief periods of office for a number of infighting family clan heads, Dowiyogo was in and out of office.
He achieved a reputation as being one of the phosphate-enriched country’s more pragmatic, sensible and business-like leaders.
However, he was never in office long enough, or could muster sufficient power, to halt the rot that bled Nauru’s phosphate fortunes by more than A$2 billion due to bad investments, waste, almost insane spending on the national airline and global shopping trips by successive leaders, and tens of millions of dollars lost to frauds on the government by a succession of foreign carpetbaggers.
During the 1980s, Dowiyogo’s bouts of office as president earned him a reputation as a radical in South Pacific politics, attacking France for its long nuclear tests series in French Polynesia and the United States for devastating parts of the Marshall Islands, close to the north-east of Nauru, with radiation from its tests there and missile tests at Kwajalein atoll.
Like most of Nauru’s other politicians, Dowiyogo developed serious diabetes, a disease afflicting more than half of the about 7000 indigenous Nauruans, and in recent years was constantly in Australia for medical treatment. He became president for the sixth time in January 2003 in a bid to save the last few dollars of the near insolvent state’s fortunes.
In a speech soon after he regained the presidency, he became the first president to officially admit to Nauruans the extent of the calamity of the loss of their national fortune.
Dowiyogo’s health deteriorated rapidly after he returned to the presidency.
