| Solomon Islands: FORTUNE TELLERS A KEY PLAYER IN GOVT DECISIONS? |
‘Fortune teller told me I would be assassinated’: PM
Alfred Sasako
As she walked into her office one day early this year, her telephone rang. It was her boss, Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare. He wanted to talk to her privately in his office.
Tina Levi, the Prime Minister’s private executive secretary, as she did on many occasions, obediently took the few steps from her office to his. She was not prepared to hear what she was about to be told.
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Solomon Islands parliament house... is fortune telling a new weapon to fight political opponents? Pic: Dev Nadkarni
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As she sat down in the Prime Minister’s inner office, Levi heard the most incredible story of her life. She wasn’t prepared. This, she related to me in Honiara recently, was the beginning of what was to come.
“A fortune teller told me that I would be assassinated by a white man,” Prime Minister Sogavare began.
“So? Why are you telling me this?” Levi asked.
“I am telling you to be aware since you work in this office. I will tell you more about this later,” he said as Levi was dismissed from the meeting. Little did she realise that one day she and the white man would be linked to the alleged assassination plot.
The encounter was brief, but it kept Levi thinking. “Why, was he telling me all this?
Three weeks to the day of Levi’s meeting with her boss, Australian war veteran, Billy Johnson was picked up for allegedly plotting to assassinate Sogavare.
According to published reports, Johnson appeared on two charges: conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to commit felony. It was a story that stunned everyone who knew Johnson as Bill.
A Vietnam War veteran, Johnson was married to a Solomon Islands national. He had been living in Honiara with his Malaitan wife since 1992.
In the Magistrate’s Court hearing that followed his arrest, the prosecution alleged that between January 18-23, this year, Johnson along with four others [all Solomon Islanders] were drinking at a Honiara motel when the plot to murder the Prime Minister was hatched.
Both charges were later thrown out. Johnson was subsequently expelled on the grounds of overstaying his residence permit.
A week after Johnson was freed, Levi was again called by Prime Minister Sogavare for a second meeting.
“The fortune teller told me that although the case was dismissed, the threat of an assassination is not over. In fact, he told me that this time it would be carried out by a light-skinned woman close to me and working in this office,” the Prime Minister began.
“As you know, there are only two women close to me—my wife Emmy and you working for me in this office.
“I want to know: would you do it? Could you?” the Prime Minister asked pointedly.
Levi said she sat there with her mouth wide open, speechless. She was flabbergasted.
Finally, she spoke. “Boss, are you saying you don’t trust me to work in this office? If so, please terminate my contract or transfer me some place else,” she said.
“Before you do, I want you to know that my father worked for the government. I have served as personal executive secretary to three different prime ministers including yourself. This is the first time I’ve been told I could never be trusted,” she said.
“I stood and left the office.”
When her father died shortly thereafter, Levi used her compassionate leave to leave the office of the Prime Minister for good.
On her return to Honiara, police visited Levi and took her statement. It now seems that fortune tellers now determine the rule of law in Solomon Islands.
It may be a new phenomenon but fortune telling is increasingly gaining popularity. And it seems everyone is using it for everything from marriage breakdowns to employment and generally good luck.
On Levi’s account, even the Prime Minister, an avid Seventh-Day Adventist follower, has turned to psychic powers for revelation about his safety, a power it seems had falsely landed Johnson in police custody and subsequently expulsion from the country.
Fortune telling is also being widely sought particularly by those who believe they had been done in by political opponents or otherwise.
For example, a number of deaths of high profile individuals in the country in recent months has been blamed on those who possess and exercise psychic powers. Others simply use it to make money.
Certain churches open their doors 24 hours a day to exorcise demons, bad luck and evil spells.
These days political offices are high targets. Disease-induced deaths are no longer treated as such. Death of a prominent figure is never caused by a disease. It is always caused by those who possess psychic powers.
Just about everyone believes someone is out to get them. It is a new belief that is sweeping through this country like wild fire.
And it is big money, if you can convince several people you have magical powers to reverse the spell on them.
Take for example, an Asian couple who live in Honiara. Recently, the wife left the husband for another man. One day the husband was visited by one of these fortune tellers. After performing certain rites in their home, the husband was told his wife was returning.
Just before dawn, there was a faint knock on the door. It was the wife. She had reportedly returned. Happy to take his wife back, he gave the fortune teller S$300.
For Prime Minister Sogavare, encounters with the dead and consulting psychic powers are not new.
Soon after the coup in Solomon Islands in June 2000, for example, Sogavare was sworn in as Prime Minister.
Some time later, he told everyone that he had had a two-three hour meeting with former prime minister Solomon Mamaloni, months after the latter had passed away. He later recounted the encounter to me and others.
It was one quiet afternoon in his office. Prime Minister Sogavare had come out to the general office area where his staff worked. As he was making his way back to his inner office, Mamaloni suddenly joined him.
At his invitation, the late Mamaloni sat down across from him and the duo engaged in a three-hour discussion.
“We covered everything including political leadership. He told me about everything, including books that I should read,” Sogavare told me when I asked him about this encounter three years ago.
During the discussion, Australia was singled out as a country not to be trusted. This seemed to confirm what Mamaloni had confided in friends that he never travelled to Australia during his time as prime minister because he believed he would be assassinated.
Sogavare said that as the discussion ended, Mamaloni stood up and left the room.
“It was then that I realised I had been talking to a dead man. I rushed out of the room and asked the staff if they saw any one coming out of my office door. They saw nothing. I was scared,” he said.
Some said that Sogavare immediately called some SDA pastors to come to the office that afternoon to pray with him. They did.
He had confided in others that his meeting with Mamaloni had inspired him to strive to become Prime Minister again.
According to insiders, he had briefed his Coalition for Change Government at least twice about the Mamaloni encounter since the government came into office almost two years ago.
Increasingly, fortune tellers are being deployed as a new weapon against crimes, political opponents and so on.
The Prime Minister’s alleged use of witch doctors or fortune tellers has sparked a new debate. Opposition MP Peter Boyers rebuffed claims by Prime Minister Sogavare that his Grand Coalition for Change Government was God-led.
“Is taking the advice of a witch doctor by the Prime Minister and having conversations with the dead have any relevance to a God-led government,” Boyers told national radio (Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation).
Boyers, formerly of Australia and now a Solomon Islands citizen, represents the West New Georgia and Vona Vona in the country’s Western Province, said the Prime Minister should refrain from using God’s name in politics.
He said the accusations by Sogavare that the Opposition is engaged in evil strategies to oust him “is an insult to the people of the Solomon Islands and can be seen as blasphemy”.
The government, he said, that was formed “under a shroud of darkness, flames and smokes was not an act of God”.
Boyers said the Prime Minister is “deceiving the nation by using God to justify incompetence and corruption”.
Sogavare said he had instructed the Police Commissioner, the new arrival from Fiji, to leave no stones unturned in the investigation into an alleged S$50,000 bribery, the issue which ignited the debate.
“I have instructed the commissioner of police and he has assured me he will be putting more resources into investigating the case to bring the culprits to justice, not only the Opposition but those people who make the money available to the Opposition to use in the evil scheme,” Sogavare said.
Whatever it is, it is a deadly cocktail of witch doctors and conversations with the dead that appear to be the new weapon being used to fight crimes or political opponents in the Solomon Islands.
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