Early warning system

J. Roughan

9 October 2009

Honiara  

Last week's severe earth movements scarred us half to death. Our Pacific region experienced a full dose of what it means to live atop the Ring of Fire. At least three intense earthquakes--the first one off the Samoan and Tonga shores, the Sumatra quake in Indonesia and most recent, a severely large quake off Vanuatu, our nearest neighbor just south of us--all hit within a week of one another. Our own local tsunami disaster of 2007 in Western Province where more than a 100 of our people died, remains fresh in our minds.

 

When Solomons people heard that a Vanuatu quake had generated a tsunami wave, it didn't take our citizens long to react. Honiara's banks, schools and shops quickly closed their doors. No. 9 patients steamed out of the hospital and headed for the Forum Fisheries hill a few hundred meters from the hospital. Fortunately, we lucked out! The tsunami warning was canceled and most of us went about our daily business as usual but with a bit more awareness and respect of the power that lurks in our surrounding seas.

 

More and more people, however, are demanding a better early warning system to protect themselves, their families and their homes from the terrifying power of a tsunami. And rightly so! Given half a chance and even a brief warning to gather up the infants, kids and the olos and head for higher ground is the least we can do.   

 

Mother Nature, if understood well enough, does give off warning signals. It has its own early warning system. But so do our social events give off warning signals of close up dangers to society. Are the current events happening in and around the country--the surge of youth home break ins around Honiara, our faltering medical service outreach, the $50,000 parliamentarian spouse handout, twenty years of Report Card failures, etc.--connected one to another? Or are these social decay signs to be seen as separate realities with little or no connection?

 

Over the past twenty years, certainly since the Social Unrest years (1998-2003) hit us so severely, the nation has been sent a series of stress signals or heard early warning bells. Most times, however, our leaders simply dismissed them as distractions or at best understood them as mere 'tempests in a tea pot'. But these early warning signals have consistently turned out to be actual warnings of serious future problems.

 

In 1999, for instance, it took the forced displacement of more than 20,000 workers and their families from Guale's plains area to wake most of us up. Guadalcanal's people had been pleading with their leaders since the late 1980s and even before to listen to their cry, address seriously the land issue and get rid of the strangers who had taken over their lands. Only when locals took matters into their own hands and had actually cleared out the palm oil plantations, when bodies were found along paths and especially when national income from the oil plantings seriously dropped did our decision makers 'leap' to action.

 

Not so long ago, only three years past in 2006 in fact, the nation was once more on the receiving end of warning signals. The 2006 national election was suppose to have ushered in a new era, with stronger leadership, more committed parliamentarians, basically a better life for most people, especially those living outside the Honiara area. But this whole dream went up in the smoke of the Chinatown Burndown.

 

Many citizens were saddened at the national leaders inability to listen to their people. People Power was sending unmistakable messages: Listen to us carefully or things will happen! Unfortunately other affairs--how to line one's pocket during a severe period of financial turmoil--crowded out people's cries.

 

Currently our youth are yelling out: We are hurting! We have little or no work. Our future looks bleak! The serious house break ins by armed  thugs sends a strong signal. Of course the vast majority of our kids are fundamentally good, well behaved and a credit to their people and the  nation. But there are a growing number of them who are sending messages to decision makers to listen to their pleas and asking leaders to do something about turning their lives around both for their own sake and the good of the nation.

 

Government pats itself on the back and boasts of how many different bills it has submitted to Parliament and how many have been past into the nation's law books. It announces to the world how long parliament has sat in session this year, one for the record book. But are these measurements, this type of ruler, or yardstick, an accurate one of how well the nation is being served? Youth are singularly unimpressed by such statements. They want to see a growth in the job market, where our drop- and push-outs can find meaningful employment.