Satish Chand
I expect you to be alarmed by this question. Just to get matters straightened upfront, I do not believe that Pacific Islanders as a group, and their leaders in particular, are any more corrupt than people from elsewhere.  

Like the majority of our people, we have some honest and hardworking leaders, but they are increasingly becoming an endangered group now. We have, however, seen more than our fair share of abuses of the privileges afforded by high public office lately. Great people and yet deteriorating leadership, why?   Here I will reconcile these two apparently conflicting observations.

Believe me, I often get asked in private discussions the question posed in the title- often by people close to me and those new to the region.

They note that many Pacific leaders have allegedly accumulated vast sums of money quickly and often during tenure of high political office.

In at attempt to get to the bottom of this, I tried twice, albeit unsuccessfully, to encourage two of my former graduate students to research this issue. Both declined the suggestion for this research in fear of joining the queue of the ‘most educated unemployed’ in their countries.  

Our popularly elected leaders, and their often politically appointed executive-heads, enjoy considerable discretion over the use (and abuse) of taxpayer funds.

The multi-hundred million dollar post-independence scams such as the National Bank of Fiji saga, the ‘Cairns Conservatory rip-off’ via the Public Officers Superannuation Fund of Papua New Guinea, and variants of the above in Marshall Islands, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu are examples of such abuses.

I could go on listing many more, but will stop to conserve space. You, no doubt, have your own favourites. While scams are not absent altogether from any country, the rapid rise in abuse of office in several of the Pacific Islands nations is a matter of serious concern to all of us. The newcomers on to scene are indeed taking note of this fact.

Why the rapid rise in abuse by many in positions of authority? This is not what our traditional elders were known for.

My readings of history, often drawn from the limited documentation of the past, suggests that the Pacific Islands had little, if any, abuse of trust by their leaders.

The early post-independence period saw little of this abuse as well. Why then the change, and for the worse, over the recent past?

Mine is a simple explanation—one that proposes that our current system of governance encourages abuse of trust by our leadership. Gatekeepers at all levels of society live to extract favours—I have experienced this first hand everywhere.

If true, then any efforts at improving governance will be futile unless it addresses the deep causes of corruption.

Incentives to deliver: Our leaders of the past had incentives to deliver as they were held accountable for their actions. Historical records of the Pacific Islands are replete with stories of inter-tribal warfare, formation of strategic allegiances-often via marriages and exchanges of gifts, and sometimes-blatant treachery that were all part and parcel of every day survival.

Leadership demanded success: success in combat and conquest. Failure meant loss of life, land, and the potential demise of the community. Yes, life was tough and troublesome, but it kept our leaders honest and competent.

The modern state provides protection from conquest. It has, in much of the Pacific, also entrenched the position of traditional elders whilst eroding the accountability infrastructure of traditional societies. Leaders, as much as crooks, are now protected by the complete machinery of a modern state; and, all funded by the taxpayer.

These leaders, though still having some responsibilities for their (wider) kin, have less reason than their peers of the past to act responsibly.

These same leaders, however, have call on much greater resources then their peers did over the past. Making matters worse still is the fact that much of modern wealth can be conveniently stashed away in foreign bank accounts and real estate.

Pigs, yams, and wives—the currency for accumulation of wealth in the past—could not all be hidden ‘under the mattress’ and away from public gaze.  

The punch line to this story is a simple one. The causes of the increase in corruption within the islands are due to a combination of three factors: (i) the wilting away of traditional systems of accountability; (ii) the ease of access to instruments to hide wealth—say in foreign anonymous bank accounts; and, (iii) the increase in the value of entrusted community-wealth-timber and land under customary title as an example.

Means of reducing corruption given the causes enumerated above are just as evident.   Resurrection of some of the traditional systems of accountability, mandating the declaration of all assets of leaders to induce greater transparency, and greater devolution of authority to community resources could be worthy of further consideration.  

Alas, I see the very opposite of the above in many instances around. Examples include greater concentration of power in the few, the emergence of dynasties, and further consolidation of privacy legislation in many of our nations.

Surely, less of the above would do more towards improving governance in the island-Pacific region. The old adage that ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ is proving to be true once again.