What price independence?
VulcanSpirit
Richard & Alison Brunstrom
Sun 8 Sep 2013 10:23
|
Vanuatu became an independent state in 1980 with a
Westminster style (surprisingly rather than a French style)
democracy. It remains a democratic country today (though it's had more
than a few wobbles along the way). Unfortunately its democracy is a mess, mixed
up with custom (ie tribal traditional) governance indistinguishable from
nepotism & cronyism, and with a plethora of small parties holding power
in a revolving series of coalitions - there have been three governments in the
last year.
The country is almost entirely aid dependent -
Australian aid alone accounts for an astonishing 40%(!) of government
expenditure, and Vanuatu also recives very large sums from the EU, France, UK
& China.
The country is littered with failed aid projects,
which seem to crash for two main reasons, both readily fixable - but fixed they
are not. The first is a problem common everywhere - aid comes in the form of a
capital grant to create something useful, but with no funds for maintenance. The
result, in the UK & in Vanuatu, is a community asset of some sort crumbling
away to uselessness for lack of money; and in Vanuatu's climate that process
doesn't take long. The second is the almost complete lack of modern skills in
the indigenous population, most of whom are still subsistence farmers living as
their forebears did before European contact. They simply can't maintain things,
and no-one (including they themselves, to be fair) seems to have thought of
training them to do so. Some of the results make you want to break down and
cry.
I have to question the very existence of a state
the vast majority of whose budget is foreign aid, particularly one whose
governance is as feeble as Vanuatu's. Withdrawl of aid would result in the
state's near immediate collapse. 30 years of aid has barely improved the country
at all (although some modern healthcare is having an effect and primary
education is near universal); I think a good case can be made that the
population of the colonised states in the Pacific are a very great deal better
off now - and they know it. In hindsight I don't think the UK &
France did the Vanuatans any favours at all in our rush to decolonise.
|