Massive transfer of national wealth!

J. Roughan

23 July 2009

Honiara  

Over the past 31 years the Solomons have witnessed a massive transfer of national wealth away from landowners, villagers and rural people to a select few--the political elite and the political class. Much of this transfer, unfortunately, has been legal!

 

The latest version of this wealth distribution scheme now three decades long has been the efforts of a few to quicken the pace of the transfer, by clothing it in legal language and await people's verdict on the action. Well, ordinary citizens across the land have had enough! Rewarding parliamentarian spouses a $50,000 termination grant has finally broken the long-suffering silence of the tax payer.

 

In the face of a global financial meltdown where country after country struggles to cope with rising budget shortfalls, the response from certain members of the political class has been to travel the opposite direction. Rather than search for ways to save money and budget wisely with dwindling amounts of ready cash, our law makers and their cronies decided to break the bank. They don't intend to save but to spend more of what is actually owned by the many to lavish it on the few. 

 

In the nation's earliest days, 1978-1986, a good case could probably have been made that its senior law makers were deserving of special privilege. After all, it was argued, although few parliamentarians brought much at all to the law making process, perhaps offering high salaries and extending to them many expensive perks, it was a way to attract the best and the brightest to the service.

 

Unfortunately, few MPs, overwhelming male, lived up to the requirements of office. A brief review of 30 years of history shows how poorly our MPs have performed over these years. Once the Solomons political class had the reigns of power in their hands, our economy began to falter badly. In 1978, for instance, the Solomons dollar was equal to the American dollar. In other words, Solomons currency was as strong as the US dollar. Now thirty years later it takes 8 Solomons dollar to buy a single American one. In fact, as any one who has traveled overseas knows, it is quite difficult to exchange our currency with other any other countries' currency.

 

Because our political class proved themselves so poor in governance, not only has our economic health taken a severe beating, but we have become the only Pacific nation beholding to other countries' military. Our parliament's disastrous mishandling of the national economy has been matched by an equally destructive drive to destroy the very nation.

 

Our first eight years of independence--1978-1986--were our best years. Compared to the following years, these first eight years witnessed real progress for most of our people, not only the few at the top. In our first years, commodity--cocoa, copra, palm oil, fish--prices started to dip worldwide. It was a case of taking two steps forward and one step backward. Still that did mean we were advancing--only one step at a time--but that was an advance although slower than we would have liked.

 

We had no war wounds to heal, destroyed infrastructure to re-make or people on their last legs. But our national leaders in the person of the MPs, their cronies as well as many local landowners refused to accept this situation. No they had a better idea! They decided to make a giant leap forward by selling off our round log wealth for miserable amounts of money.

 

The round tree export of the 1980s led directly to the Social Unrest years of 1998-2003 when the country nearly destroyed itself. Without a unified police force and a dedicated Central government capable of leading people and overseeing a weakening economy, all we could do was to ask the rest of the Pacific to come in and save us.   

 

Yet, before RAMSI ever landed on our shores it was the village and the villager which came to the rescue and kept us afloat until the might of Australia and other Pacific nations could stabilize the nation. Now six years down the track, although we are still not healed, the same leaders who pounded the country to its knees are at it again. They want to continue the same game plan--massive transfer of national wealth into their own pockets--that brought so much destruction and heartache to the nation in the first place. When will we ever learn?