High Tide
A Ruined Future?
A Dearth Of Opportunities For Pacific Youth
Compiling the statistics that figure in our annual Pacific Almanac is always a sobering and challenging experience, and in the case of unemployment figures for our various islands, an alarming one. Granted, statistics offices around the region concede these numbers are somewhat unreliable, in many cases they don’t identify underemployment, but even with this and other qualifications, the situation is deteriorating, not improving.
The fact that it is the Pacific’s young people that make up the vast number of our unemployed gave some additional context to the recent political and human crises in Fiji and Tonga featured in this issue of Pacific.
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In Tonga, six young people have died in the riots of “Black Thursday”—November 16. Reports from Tongan media have suggested that the deceased were among the rioters that trashed downtown Nuku’alofa, causing millions of dollars worth of physical damage.
There have also been widespread reports that they were part of a drunken crowd, that was under or unemployed and vulnerable to exploitation by others. Tonga’s consul in Australia has said that many of the young people involved in the riots had been deported from Australia, New Zealand and the United States, after being jailed in those countries for petty crimes, where as she put it, “we taught them how to be good criminals.”
In Fiji, which for some years has been struggling with a workforce that is growing dramatically in size as thousands of school leavers graduate, the economic future again seems grim.
Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama’s coup has prompted members of the “Emerging Leaders Forum,” all graduates of a Fiji Women’s Rights Movement’s mentoring program, to write, “What we have now is a ruined future for all of us, young people in particular. We have a future where young people might not have access to education through cancellation of international scholarships; unemployment will increase locally as well as international work schemes being stopped and our confidence in law keepers has reached an all-time low.
“It is amazing how adults like the Commander and the Prime Minister were not able to sort things out by talking. We need to stop this ‘coup culture.’ Commander, you have taken us 20 years back in history. We have very negative male role models in Fiji – it is no wonder our crime rate is increasing.”
One of the signatories to that letter is Jacque Koroivulano, president of the Pacific Youth Council, who told leaders gathered at the Pacific Islands Forum in November that the concerns of young people should be given more weight, and backed up with budgetary support.
The challenges of providing sufficient opportunity for the Pacific’s young people are well known from Majuro and Saipan to islands further south—witness Port Moresby’s ongoing crime problems and riots in Honiara early last year. Regional leaders are hoping that the recently announced Pacific seasonal work scheme with New Zealand will provide a model to alleviate some of the pressure. But the pressure is on to continue to find solutions at home, too.
