Politics of self-destruction

It is common knowledge among investors and their business strategists who’ve had dealings with island governments throughout the Pacific that the most difficult hurdle in their investment schemes is the agonizing ordeal of making politicians understand the essence of building a healthy economy.

It is even more difficult making these leaders understand that investments translate to job creation where opportunities arise for the indigenous people to bring home the bacon, so to speak. This has been and continues to be the most problematic aspect of investing in the islands.

Most politicians have never had any hands on business experience. If they did, they use their operations in the serviced sector as the center upon which to measure others in the various service sectors. They have no conception what the manufacturing sector is all about. As such, there’s the propensity to throw this sector every conceivable book in the land in what we know of as strangling laws and regulations, not to mention ill-conceived taxes.

We don’t know what it’ll take to wake-up our policy-makers to the fact that our once thriving tourism industry has gone deep south. Interesting that the industry we’ve viewed with disdain is the only one that works: Garment! It’s inconceivable how politicians have seen fit to perpetuate the leper-like treatment our detractors have used against the industry since 1993 to quell their perceived fear.

This is what we call the politics of self-destruction where we allow others (mediocre bureaucrats in the US Department of Interior) to dictate unrealistic and irrelevant economic policies in absentia employing the fear tactic. Has the US Department of Interior been out here to assist our ailing economy or has it played hands off perhaps to see how we would fare protecting what’s left of the local economy?

The greater question that our men of wisdom ought to ask themselves is: Who do am I representing? The destructive agenda of the US Department of Interior or the livelihood of the people of these islands whom you represent in one of two chambers in the legislature? Why do you wish to destroy their only means of income — some 3,000 plus of them — at a time when the local economy consistently loses revenue in double digit figures? Or have you come up with economic substitutes equal in magnitude as the garment industry that now feeds the local coffers because tourism has crumbled all over the place?

Gentlemen: It isn’t what you do today that matters as much as what you would have failed to do to enhance an industry that now feeds thousands of families today. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out this issue thoroughly. It only needs your use of common sense.

May there be brighter days ahead for the people whose fate you’ve decided to compromise amidst an economic tsunami destined to ravage all that we’ve worked for not that this external influence is all that powerful, but you too have threatened the destruction of our last economic pillar that supports the livelihood of thousands of families.