Getting Down to Business

26 March 2016 admin

Finally, we have a budget. It’s saddening, really, that in the face of so many other crises, actually passing a budget has barely raised a feather on the nation’s proverbial back. But there it is.

The best part of our Parliamentarians getting back to business was that they really got down to business.

Opposition Leader Ishmael Kalsakau and his colleagues organised a pre-budget workshop, spending the better part of a week preparing. They arrived in the chamber fully loaded and ready to fire away at the Government’s spending decisions.

The budget debate was broadcast live and streamed over the internet. Anyone who watched it was treated to a novel display of political theatre. Once we got past the irony of watching senior members of the Opposition opposing a budget they were instrumental in creating, it was genuinely refreshing and encouraging to see the pointed questions and quiet ripostes that filled the debate.

It also became painfully clear that even some veteran politicians are not yet fully-fledged parliamentarians. A lot of work still needs to be done to bring this new crop of MPs up to speed with the formal processes of government.

Outside the chamber, things have been moving quickly as well. They have to. There are still many unresolved crises. Read more “Getting Down to Business”

THE UNITY OF THE NATION

12 October 2015 admin

“The head of the Republic shall be known as the President and shall symbolise the unity of the nation.”

That’s how chapter six of the Constitution of Vanuatu describes the head of state: A symbol of the unity of the nation. The rumours and reports that ran rampant around town yesterday did nothing to uphold this country’s sense of unity. Quite the opposite.

While Marcelino Pipite did sign an instrument of pardon Saturday, the document is of questionable legality, but more to the point, it is politically, socially and morally indefensible.

If Mr Pipite’s gambit succeeds, it would, as MP Samson Samsen said so memorably in his testimony, mean we no longer fear God. Our leaders could fairly be said to have lost their moral compass.

When he emerged from the courtroom Friday afternoon, Moana Carcasses reiterated his respect for the integrity of the judicial process. Likewise, he cautioned his supporters to “respect the judgment” and not to take the law into their own hands.

Presumably, he said the same to his peers. First-hand reports of the brief speech that he gave following a meeting at the Prime Minister’s Office Friday evening suggest that he made substantially the same statements then, too.

Surely Mr Pipite was listening? What could possibly possess someone even to contemplate a pardon at this stage?

The Constitution states, “The President of the Republic may pardon, commute or reduce a sentence imposed on a person….” Given that nobody has been sentenced yet, it’s questionable whether a pardon is even legally possible right now.

We do the public a disservice to discuss Friday’s verdict and start bandying pardons about in the same breath. To do so would undermine public trust in our political leaders, which is already at low ebb. Furthermore, such could erode our faith in the power of the courts.

It’s fair to ask: If the players start ignoring the referee’s red card, can we still say they’re playing football, or has the game changed completely?

We fear that this announcement will have exactly the effect Mr Pipite claimed he wanted to avoid. While the Opposition has refrained from commenting and is sure to advise calm, it’s hard to imagine that this will be sufficient to salve rapidly fraying tempers.

This announcement is poorly timed, of questionable legality and leads the country further into uncharted political waters. In every respect, it is contrary to the public interest.

As this newspaper goes to press, there is still no comment from the Prime Minister. People close to him say that he was not consulted in this process, and that he found out about it through the media. Opposition leaders have not received a response from Mr Kilman in spite of repeated requests for an urgent meeting.

People everywhere look to their government for leadership. We expect them to safeguard the unity of the nation. Yesterday’s actions may well do exactly the opposite.

The chambers of the heart

27 March 2014 admin

You are in the fourth chamber
You are in the fourth chamber and you are pushing    
half impelled          at a doorway

a moving crowd     a crush
like breath held far too long 
and far too deep

lockstep on a pilgrimage of longing 
a pace     another pace inside 
this carapace of gesture and humiliation

s'io credesse       s'io credesse
move me Lord
but let me know I am being moved

40 Dei Ramble

24 May 2009 Dan McGarry

I need to say a few things about Wan Smolbag as an artistic institution, and the only way to get there is to indulge in a deliberate bit of hand-waving that runs the risk of belittling the dozens of non-theatrical activities they manage. There’s a small mountain of data out there expressing in very finite terms just how effective this group is.

My point, I guess, is that no matter how good that makes them – and they are very good indeed – there’s more to it than that. And that’s what I want to write about today.

I’m not going to attempt to structure this in any useful way. This really is as much a personal exercise as a public one: If I succeed in conveying a sense of what makes Smolbag so unique to you, I might understand it better myself….

I ran into Peter Walker and Jo Dorras, the founders of Wan Smolbag Theatre company, in town yesterday. They stopped and thanked me for the review I wrote about 40 Dei, their latest stage production. As she turned to leave, Jo said, “Nobody’s ever written that kind of a review on us before.”

Public commentators in Vanuatu don’t write nearly often enough about Wan Smolbag. Even when they do, their description of the work and its effect tend to fit them into the ‘development NGO’ straitjacket. That’s not entirely inaccurate, of course; Smolbag is a development NGO. But such descriptions are incomplete.

Woefully so, in my opinion. Once understood, the reasons for this misperception explain a great deal about the failures of many formal development programmes. (That’s programmes, mind you, not projects. But that’s an essay for another day.) The problem, ultimately, is our human incapacity to quantify, or even adequately to analyse, certain cultural inputs.

Now, given that Smolbag has been working with the softer tools of drama, dialogue, understanding and community awareness for twenty years, they’ve got the issue pretty well sussed. At least innately. If there are still tensions between what they want to do and what donors are willing to fund, they’re manageable, and it must be said that, from top to bottom, Smolbag staff know what they’re about. They’re are as good at demonstrating the value of their work to donors, partners and the public as anyone I’ve encountered in a couple of decades of part- and full-time advocacy work.

But the preceding is really just a digression – I need to say a few things about Wan Smolbag as an artistic institution, and the only way to get there is to indulge in a deliberate bit of hand-waving that runs the risk of belittling the dozens of non-theatrical activities they manage. There’s a small mountain of data out there expressing in very finite terms just how effective this group is.

My point, I guess, is that no matter how good that makes them – and they are very good indeed – there’s more to it than that. And that’s what I want to write about today.

Kastom and Reconciliation

3 May 2009 Dan McGarry

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]

Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s April 30 arrival in Honiara, Solomon Islands marked what everyone hopes is a historic beginning of a new era in Solomons – and Melanesian – politics.

When the Nobel Laureate first posited the idea of Truth and Reconciliation, it was, for South Africa and much of the world, a startling, even revolutionary approach to dealing with societal and political conflict. The idea that an entire nation could dispense with winners and losers was unorthodox, to say the least. Enlightenment thought, based as it is on the rights of the individual, ranks justice higher than all else, making it the very measure of democracy.

Not so in the Solomon Islands, nor in the bulk of Melanesian society. Thousands of years of largely static village life have built into the Melanesia consciousness a tendency to focus more on peace-making than on justice per se. Put simply, retribution doesn’t make for good neighbours. If the person next door has wronged you, you’ve got to measure the merits of retribution against the knowledge that the two of you are going to remain neighbours for your – and your children’s – lifetime.

Good relations are more important than anything else, even if it means ignoring past slights.

In a 1997 article for the Australian Financial Review, journalist Ben Bohane[*] suggested that the key to re-establishing peace in war-torn Bougainville lay in the much-derided kastom movements that animated much of the conflict. “Cults of War” traces the roots of Melanesian kastom movements and cults to the spiritualisation of a fundamental desire for equality between indigenous peoples and their colonial masters. Although expressed in a simplistic mix of metaphor, legend and charismatism, the cargo cult movements that took root throughout PNG, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu are a clear expression of the desire for a more equal distribution of wealth.

Had Karl Marx been born in the South Pacific, he might have phrased things in much the same terms.

Read more “Kastom and Reconciliation”

Counterpoint

1 March 2009 Dan McGarry

Picture Kalori, a young man of rank and potential in the 1970s, watching his fathers become isolated and shifted out of power, while young, foreign-educated firebrands radioed political speeches from hiding places in the bush only a few kilometres from his nasara.

The young lawyer who preached, Castro-like, over the bush radio is now President of Vanuatu. Chief Kalori remains in his village, very much the injured lion. He is quick to reprove the country’s founders, men he – not entirely without reason – considered under-educated and ill-prepared for the demands of ruling a newborn nation.

While Kalori is alive, there will be another view of Independence: not undesirable, but in the 1980s untimely and rash. He feels that everything that has transpired since then, the venality, pettiness, lack of political coherence or cohesion… all of this can be laid at the feet of some brash young men who lacked the education and the wisdom to take a more patient tack.

Chief Kalori The problem with having 850 words a week is that I can only say one thing at a time.

Yesterday I wrote about the need for the development of a coherent and unifying political philosophy in Vanuatu. Today, I feel I should explain why the development of such a vision is a difficult – not to say intractable – problem.

This is Chief Kalori of Clem’s Hill. One of the young turks in Efate’s francophone population at the time of the Independence movement of the 1970s, he presided over a community responsive to the French argument for a go-slow approach. As members of a large, distinct minority, they felt they had every reason to fear being overwhelmed and shouted down by the largely Anglican/Presbyterian leadership of the Independence movement.

The French at the time were much more conservative in their approach to Independence. They are presently the last colonial power in the region that hasn’t utterly divested itself of the trappings of overt rule. In the 1970s, the French quietly and not-so-subtly provided assistance to anti-Independence political parties (eventually united under the familiar mantle of the Union des Parties Modérées, or UMP) and supported rebellions on Santo and Tanna.

The View From There

11 October 2008 Dan McGarry

[This week’s Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent.]

I spent a couple of weeks last month in Timor-Leste, the world’s youngest nation. I’d gone to lend a hand to civil society there, to apply a few of the lessons learned in Vanuatu to the communications needs of this nascent nation.

The lessons learned were mostly mine.

Five years of immersion in the day-to-day ritual of mundane, incremental development makes it difficult to keep perspective on the big things. True, we’ve had a few red letter days in the recent past, among them the roll-out of Digicel’s new mobile network and Telecom’s massive slashing in Internet rates. But seen from so close up, the magnitude of these events is sometimes hard to grasp.

Take a few steps away, though, and things spring into focus. Timor-Leste is in a similar situation to Vanuatu when I first arrived in 2003. The government is just now developing the awareness and capacity to think comprehensively about communications. Internet use among civil society organisations is limited almost entirely to the capital, and it what little occurs is mostly between NGOs and outside agencies. There is little domestic inter-organisational communication, virtually none using anything more advanced than a telephone.

Timor is beginning to bloom now like the bougainvillea one sees amid the dust, glowing in the desert light. From one week to the next, the street I stayed on saw new shops opening, or re-opening. Timor is experiencing a quickening of the pulse.

Housework

18 July 2007 Dan McGarry

Ever since I arrived in Vanuatu almost four years ago, I’ve woken every morning to the rhythmic shushing of the scrub brush as the women in the neighbourhood do the morning wash. It’s often the last thing I hear before sundown as well.

Anyone who’s ever washed their clothes by hand knows just how arduous the process is. Most of the women in Vanuatu have extremely well-defined arm muscles, and many of the older women on the islands are built like wrestlers. Laundry is one of the reasons why.

When Georgeline approached me some time ago with the news that she’d begun participating in a micro-finance scheme, I encouraged her to do so, and immediately began wracking my brains for an activity that would allow her to earn money and still take care of little Daniela full-time. I tossed out an idea or two, but nothing that seemed very compelling. Georgeline was patient with me, and waited for me to wind down before telling me that she already knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to buy a washing machine, and charge the local women to use it.

How very stupid of me not to have thought of it before.