The View From There

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.

Read more “The View From There”

Masters in our own House?

Dan McGarry

Economic hardship is expressed in the simplest terms in Vanuatu. The price of rice, of diesel and cooking gas, the selling price of copra and kava – all of these hit closest to home. The most pressing question facing our new government is how best to insulate Vanuatu from the worst of the economic turmoil affecting the world’s economies.

The question for all ni-Vanuatu is how to hold the new government to account.

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

Economic hardship is expressed in the simplest terms in Vanuatu. The price of rice, of diesel and cooking gas, the selling price of copra and kava – all of these hit closest to home. The most pressing question facing our new government is how best to insulate Vanuatu from the worst of the economic turmoil affecting the world’s economies.

The question for all ni-Vanuatu is how to hold the new government to account.

Economists describe Vanuatu’s position as that of a ‘price taker’. In layman’s terms that means we don’t get much of a say in how prices are set. OPEC members have never heard of us, and are content to keep it that way. Commodity exchanges deal in volumes that give Vanuatu no more say over prices than a corner shopkeeper.

Nonetheless, government decisions echo throughout the local economy. It’s limited in what it can do, but what it does affects us directly.

Read more “Masters in our own House?”

License to Bill

Dan McGarry

Hidden inside the legalese contained in the government of Vanuatu’s draft telecommunications licensign policy are important questions concerning Internet access in the islands and the need to ensure that the fundamental rights of freedom of speech and access to information are protected.

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

The next phase of the government’s telecommunications strategy is under way.

A little over a week ago, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Public Utilities began a public consultation process designed to gather feedback on the next set of telecommunications licenses, which should be available in the coming months.

Copies of the draft licensing policy are available at the Ministry offices, or you can get them courtesy of the Vanuatu IT Users Society at vitus.org.vu.

This kind of thing is tedious, detailed and boring for virtually everyone concerned. It’s also a critical step in Vanuatu’s development. Hidden inside the legalese are important questions concerning Internet access in the islands and the need to ensure that the fundamental rights of freedom of speech and access to information are protected.

Read more “License to Bill”

Spit and a Handshake

Dan McGarry

Horse traders in Ireland famously spit into their palms before shaking hands to seal a deal. A great deal of spitting goes on in Vanuatu-style horse trading, but it’s almost all kava-induced.

Almost all.

The political scene here is small enough that everyone knows each other. In some cases, this acquaintance borders on respect, even camaraderie. But in a few cases, familiarity has bred a special kind of contempt. As potential coalition line-ups are considered, the question, often enough, is which players are capable of sitting together in the same room long enough to agree about anything.

Read more “Spit and a Handshake”

All the Young Turks

Dan McGarry

How the mighty have fallen. As Vanuatu counts the votes from Tuesday’s election, it’s becoming increasingly evident that some of the figures who have dominated the political scene in Vanuatu since Independence are falling by the wayside.

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

How the mighty have fallen. As Vanuatu counts the votes from Tuesday’s election, it’s becoming increasingly evident that some of the figures who have dominated the political scene in Vanuatu since Independence are falling by the wayside.

In my last column, I argued that policy and principle had suffered such neglect in recent years that Vanuatu voters had turned inward, trading their votes for the most direct and straightforward rewards. Saucepans and bags of rice had become the currency of the electorate, because promises never came to anything. A week later, we appear to be witnessing the demise of some of the strongest proponents of this practice.

According to some, that’s not entirely good news.

Read more “All the Young Turks”

Becoming Digital

Dan McGarry

Whether we want to peek at Brad and Angelina’s twins or carbon date Eva de Naharon, we can do so via digital technology. Nicholas Negroponte puts it quite simply: Everything that can be stored as bits will be stored as bits. Lack of resources, planning and understanding mean that in many parts of the developing world, most local knowledge can’t or won’t survive the transition.

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

In 1995, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT’s Media Lab, published a seminal book of essays, titled Being Digital.  At the core of his work was his division of all things into atoms or bits. Just as an atom is the basic particle of matter in modern physics, bits are the basic particle of data in modern computing. All the material things in the world are composed of atoms. Increasingly, all of our ideas, learning, communications and stories are expressed in digital format.

As all technological fortune-tellers do, Negroponte gets some things very right and others very wrong. I’m not writing a book review, though, so I’m not going to enumerate each little quirk and quibble. He did get one big lesson right, and we need to learn it.

Developing nations everywhere share a common set of problems. The most obvious and common of them is a simple lack of capacity to begin taking advantage of the things that people in developed nations take for granted: instantaneous communications and the ability to access, gather and store vast amounts of information about every single aspect of humanity, no matter how trivial.

Whether we want to peek at Brad and Angelina’s twins or carbon date Eva de Naharon, we can do so via digital technology. Negroponte puts it quite simply: Everything that can be stored as bits will be stored as bits. Lack of resources, planning and understanding mean that in many parts of the developing world, most local knowledge can’t or won’t survive the transition.

Read more “Becoming Digital”

First election results

Dan McGarry6 Comments

The very first election results are starting to trickle in. They’re very preliminary, incomplete and subject to change.

This is gossip, not reporting.

Final Update: Okay, it’s time to call it a day on this thread. I’ve been cross-referencing sources all over town, and the only thing that’s clear is that nothing is clear. The electoral office is not releasing numbers, and until they do there’s just too much inaccuracy – some of it certainly agenda-driven – to rely on at all. I won’t suggest you completely disregard what lies below; just take it all with a bucketful of salt.

(Update: Note that this page seems to contradict the previous. Ralph’s site was down just a little while ago, so they might have reverted to an earlier version to get the site back online. One source told me that they kept updating until late into the night, but ultimately left off. I take this to mean that his site is not at all accurate at the moment. Only goes to show that everything we say about the results at this stage is nearly pure speculation.)

(‘Nother update: I’ve talked to a few more people, and though minor details vary, the numbers in the first link appear to be indicative of the situation, if not perfect in detail. Candidate names, as compared with three other sources, seem to be more or less correct, and increasingly complete. Just got feedback from someone who’s a bit of an authority on this stuff, and apparently there are some significant discrepancies in the list above. Unfortunately, there is no canonical site for this, and little authoritative information online anywhere. That doesn’t change much of the prognostication below, however.)

(September 4, 08:00: Updated yet again to reflect new information and comments below.)

As the passing of a single day has shown, it’s remarkably easy to be wrong about even larger details. This article is starting to look like wikipedia in the middle of an edit war, but I’ll not be removing details, no matter how embarrassing to me. I feel that this is the best testament to the fluidity of the situation, and perhaps the most persuasive argument possible for greater transparency and information sharing.

My back-of-the-napkin analysis is getting rather long-winded, but I’m not (yet) willing to split it out into separate posts, so I’ll push it below a cut. Many more details follow….

Read more “First election results”

Election follies

Dan McGarry

This week’s column for the Daily Post is about Vanuatu’s imminent general election, to be held on September 2nd. In the course of researching this country’s political and electoral history, I found far more than I could reasonably fit into a spartan 850 words. So here’s a rambling brain dump about some of the more interesting peculiarities Vanuatu’s electoral landscape….

Read more “Election follies”

Voting for the Man

Dan McGarry1 Comment

To the casual outsider, it beggars imagination that most of the people responsible for the ungodly political mess of the 1990s still enjoy broad voter support. To many ni-Vanuatu, though, the question doesn’t even bear asking.

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

The 1990s were a time that many in Vanuatu might prefer to forget. Internecine political disputes resulted in a government more changeable than the weather. Senior ministers fought a running legal and ideological battle with Ombudsman Marie-Noelle Patterson. They were so distracted that they utterly ignored the business of governing. Failure to table a budget in 1996 led the VMF to abduct President Lenelcau in order to force payment of nearly 100 million vatu in outstanding allowances. The gutting of the National Provident Fund by politicians and senior government officials brought angry rioters into the streets and resulted in widespread damage.

This culminated in a tragicomedy of errors involving huckster Amarendra Nath Ghosh, a bogus ‘world’s largest ruby’, and the issuance of illegal bonds that would have beggared the nation. The gemstone is the only thing of enduring value. It serves as a paperweight in the Ministry of Finance.

To the casual outsider, it beggars imagination that most of the people responsible for this ungodly mess still enjoy broad voter support. To many ni-Vanuatu, though, the question doesn’t even bear asking.

Read more “Voting for the Man”

Then and Now

Dan McGarry

Nobody seems to have anticipated just how widespread and immediate the effects of telecoms liberalisation would be. Some of the expectations outlined in the World Bank report titled ‘Infrastructure Regulatory Review’ appear now to be quite conservative, in some cases landing nearly outside the ballpark.

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

In July 2004, the World Bank presented a report on the state of Vanuatu’s public utilities to the public.

This was a watershed moment. From that moment, the government of Vanuatu formally committed itself to a process that ultimately led to the break-up of the telecommunications monopoly and the creation of the Utilities Regulatory Authority.

The transformation since then has been nothing short of remarkable. Nobody seems to have anticipated just how widespread and immediate the effects of telecoms liberalisation would be. Some of the expectations outlined in the Infrastructure Regulatory Review appear now to be quite conservative, in some cases landing nearly outside the ballpark.

Perhaps most telling is the report’s contention that ‘low income, low population base, low urbanization and low literacy rate are characteristics which suggest that demand for telecommunications services in Vanuatu is likely to be constrained.’

Experience seems to indicate quite the opposite.
Read more “Then and Now”