Lourdes Pangelinan Wins Final Term As SPC Chief

Lourdes Pangelinan...into her third and final term.

It was without any fanfare that the third conference of the Pacific Community in Fiji gave Lourdes Pangelinan her third and final term as director-general of the Noumea-based regional body. In fact no formal announcement was made, and it was left to the incumbent director-general to disclose the extension when asked at a media conference at the Raffle Tradewinds Hotel in Suva last month. Whether one should read more into the oversight nobody knows but it was clear there would hardly be room for celebration in Pangelinan's final three years in office.

She would have got an inkling when Fiji's Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase welcomed delegates only to say what a good host ought not to have uttered, that may be there are just too many regional bodies in the Pacific. "The never-ending stream of meetings and conferences produced by these organisations consumes millions of dollars‹but to what purpose," Qarase complained. "Now obviously some meetings are critical and should be attended. But I suspect a close analysis would reveal that many achieve very little and that the follow-up is minimal."

Pangelinan later told journalists that she agreed with Qarase that the number of regional organisations was "large". But she pointed out that the answer would be for these bodies to coordinate their work. "I think those who attended the committee meeting and conference (of SPC) saw that in action. In the area of health, for example, there were a number of interventions made by our colleagues in other regional organisations, from the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, World Health Organisation, from partner organisations as well."

Qarase did not name the organisations he felt were ineffective, but Pangelinan and her team at SPC would need to work harder to impress critics like Fiji's Qarase. For a start, heads of government of SPC's member countries and territories including the five founding members of Australia, France, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States, 27 of them altogether, ought to be encouraged to send senior officials to its meetings.

At the one Fiji recently hosted, only American Samoa had its head of state in attendance with many opting to send junior representatives. This then raises the question of whether these delegates have the mandate to commit their countries and territories to paying more money to the organisation. Officials from Fiji and Papua New Guinea were caught in this bind when the 33rd meeting of the Committee of Representatives of Governments and Administrations (CRGA), which preceded the SPC conference, voted to increase their annual contribution by 0.09 percent from 2004. Interestingly, the hike in contributions for these bigger countries and territories (apart from Fiji and Papua New Guinea, this also included French Polynesia and New Caledonia) was done to allow Guam and the Solomon Islands to reduce their annual financial commitments. Guam, thanks to Pangelinan's recommendation, would pay CFP24,997 less and Solomon Islands' CFP3,931. If the United States territory is grateful that one of her own is heading a regional body, it is not showing in meeting its financial contributions to SPC. Guam has not been paying since 1998, accumulating its arrears to US$290,053 as at November 6, 2003, becoming the member with the largest arrears. Solomon Islands with arrears of US$108,806 is third after Nauru which owes US$149,818. Cook Islands will also have to fork out an additional CFP4,282 to meet the downgrade in the two countries' votes. Pangelinan would not be drawn into her country's deepening debt with her organisation. She did raise the matter though in her annual report, and a separate paper was tabled on the issue. Total contribution owed by early November was US$952,153 and auditors, the conference heard, is pressuring SPC to make provisions for these arrears in its financial statement. SPC countered the issue is one of timing not recoverability, borrowing from the University of the South Pacific practice that such arrears are "sovereign debts" that would be met eventually. The point was also made that if the debt deepens, the regional body may have to ask for a bank loan to stay afloat. The SPC itself ruled out the option of suspending services for member countries that have defaulted, although it said the other suggestion of imposing interest penalties could be pursued.

Apart from defaulting members who currently meet 10 percent of the SPC's US$29 million budget (the rest being shouldered by the five donor members), Pangelinan's other challenge would be attracting and retaining her best staff.

Because of this, she recommended and obtained from the conference a five percent pay rise for her professional staff, although the suggestion that it be a bonus was changed by delegates to be a one-off payment. The raise for little more than half of SPC's total workforce stems from a consultant's review of remuneration of regional organisations which noted a "gap" in regional organisation salaries to that of the "approved comparator market," the Australian Public Service (APS). Pegging SPC salaries to that of APS was a decision of a previous conference, but delegates especially from France and French Polynesia questioned the need to use the Australian system. France preferred a basket of comparators from several islands countries and not Australia exclusively. A working committee comprising diplomats of Suva-based missions of SPC countries, assisted by representatives of regional bodies, will pursue the subject in detail.

"Many of these regional organisations require specialised skills so a number of our positions certainly call for not only the most qualified individuals but individuals who sometimes have skills that are rare and in great demand in the international market. So very clearly the question of remuneration arrangement in regional organisations is a very important one," Pangelinan told Islands Business. But not all members are buying the argument and Pangelinan and her team would have to try harder to convince the sceptics. Like in the vote for the one-off pay raise, several countries including Australia, Britain and the United States had asked that the meeting's minutes record their refusal to support it because they were not given enough time to study the proposal. In fact the proposal was handed to the delegates on the day of the meeting.

In the absence of a thorough study of the proposal and clear directives from their governments, delegates of these countries that also included Kiribati, Niue and Tuvalu opted not to support the pay rise.

Late delivery of conference papers is still an issue the SPC needs to address quite urgently. Although Papua New Guinea complained about it in the previous CRGA, delegates did not see any drastic improvement in the Suva conference.