Our Manu Samoa has done us proud once again.
What a rare treat to feel the extra lift that only comes along on triumphs like this.
Now and then our rugby pride will assert itself and when they do we cherish the moment as we do now.
Our Manu Samoa victory away from home is a very welcome change to all the acrimony that continues to linger like a bad after taste in our politics.
Thank you for the much needed moment of relief boys. It is like taking toothbrush and paste to a mouth left unwashed for more than a year.
May your winning ways continue champ.
Running along this bubbly mood of appreciation is a special salute to Pauli Prince Suhren and his SNPF staff.
The jubilee parade along Beach Road was another special moment of joyous achievement to savour in this bitter, destructive climate of political spite.
The celebration of the Fund’s 50 years of service sparked a lot of good feeling we have been lacking for an awfully long time.
Pauli and his hardworking staff are the cavalry riding to our rescue as our economy wobbles under the global influence of disease and war.
The payouts they are making are real. It buys real food, put petrol in the tank, buy Jesus love with donations to the tax-free pocket of the ‘faifeau’ and more.
SNPF thank you for being real.
We were promised millions of tala to do as we please by some influential people but as it turned out we would have been better off with monopoly money.
At least the paper would come in handy to wipe something with instead of your own clean hands.
Our very own Tiafau Malae has become the ‘Malae Of Angry Tears.’
For more than a year now, our political leaders who serve there have worked overtime to stockpile reserves of malice to handout.
Come to think of it, maybe it was malice they promised not million tala handouts. Our bad….or is it really our bad?
While we stagger under our domestic troubles our Blue Pacific region does not smell like fresh picked apples and oranges as well.
If anything is running strange it is our region of peace and calm turning into a political playground for the big boys in Washington and its Pacific proxies and the expanding economic status of Beijing.
A month or so back the Solomon Is. signed a security agreement with China that rattled the powerful Aussies, enough to bang the tom toms to remind the region we are a family.
The reminding beats tracked after the Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs who was spreading the good word of taking up a big brother security role for any of the members.
Any bullying threats from anyone, anytime and anywhere and they will have to answer to the security muscle of their big Asian brother.
While that appears to have settled to the backburner to simmer, Kiribati threw the Forum leaders meeting in Fiji a stink bomb with an official announcement it is pulling out.
Whispers of the island nation linking up to China are being circulated.
Suddenly we hear the US vice President is lined up to address the Forum leaders meeting.
Promises of ‘deep support’ for the region was made including announcements of American embassies to be set up in selected member countries including Kiribati.
What! No complaints about being family or is that only when China is involved?
Australia and New Zealand followed shortly after when they paid for a desalination plant to turn seawater into drinking water for the Kiribati.
Back here in Samoa, former Prime Minister Tuilaepa, who was once the longest serving leader in the Forum, worried about the politics inside the Forum.
His longstanding worry is the separation of ethnic groupings into Polynesian, Melanesian and Micronesians.
What Tuilaepa observed and warned against is when politics are involved the tendency is to break into ethnic groupings when calls are made for a vote.
The classic example is when the Micronesians threatened to pull out when the Cook Is. former PM was elected Secretary General.
The Micronesians were angry as it was their turn but they were passed over. This was after firstly a Polynesian followed by a Melanesian took their turns.
This is where the decision by Kiribati to pull out is rooted.
With the political weaning from the outside by the big boys and the cracks of unity along the different ethnic groupings on the inside, our region of peace is not really at peace.
Nothing funny about it though. It is about how politics can turn our world seriously weird.
How do we fix it?
Not with promises of million tala cash handouts you don’t deliver on.