4:38 PM |
by John Campbell of Campbell Live 
John Campbell arrived in Samoa on the day of the tsunami. He is pictured at Lalomanu Beach. Photo: Jaydin O'Grady.
Prime Minister, Tuilaepa Sa'ilele Malielegaoi and deputy Prime Minister, Misa Telefoni, continue to be strongly critical of a story I filed for TV3 (New Zealand).
This is about the Government's use of the aid money it received from the international community in the wake of the tsunami.
I stand by that story.
By our estimation, using figures given to us by Misa Telefoni himself, the Samoan Government has so far explicitly accounted for less than half the money pledged to it by the international community.
Misa Telefoni provided us with these figures in a 71 page Government document made available to us, for the first time, in the minutes immediately prior to my interview with him.
At the same time, he also provided us with an article he had written about Miss Samoa New Zealand, Ms Maree Angelica Wright, and was adamant I read it.
He then wanted to discuss this, at length, in the period prior to our interview.
We have subsequently had time to carefully examine the 71 page aid expenditure document the Samoan Government presented us with.
On page 24 of this document, a table lists "Donors and Donations to Recovery Plan". At the current exchange rate, this table states the Samoan Government received donations, pledges and loans totalling T$166,000,000.
On page 66 of Misa Telefoni's document, Annex 6 lists where this money is being spent. The total expenditure detailed in Annex 6 is T$61,855,000. That is almost exactly $100,000,000 less than the Government's own figures show it has budgeted to receive. That is a very large discrepancy.
I have not invented this. These are not figures from some foreign journalist. This is simply and starkly evident in the Government's own figures.
What is also evident from these figures, is the Government's own priorities.
A total of $9,000,000 has been provided for housing. This is only 5.4 per cent of the total money being made available to the Government by the international community.
Strikingly, in these very documents, the Government itself declares that figure is insufficient, stating there are too few water tanks for the number of new homes being built.
So, a year on from the tsunami, a Government with roughly $100,000,000 yet to be accounted for, clearly admits its own people are still living with inadequate water supplies.
Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sa'ilele Malielegaoi has sought to discredit us, suggesting that me and my Producer, Claudine MacLean, are "Johnny Come Lately" foreigners, intent on causing mischief.
This is manifestly untrue.
I first visited Samoa as a journalist in 1995, 15 years ago.
In the past year alone, I have been to Samoa four times. I came up on the very day of the tsunami, fronting our programme live from Samoa for the rest of that week. (I recently won the Best Presenter prize at the Qantas New Zealand Media Awards for my work during this time.)
Our TV programme then returned to record our Christmas Special at Lalomanu beach: bringing gifts and donations with us. Misa Telefoni himself, heaped praise on this work.
I then returned twice this year. And on the first occasion, in August, was struck by how little appeared to have changed along the tsunami coastline, and by how the people I had found so courageous, dignified and remarkably optimistic when I visited them last year, were now noticeably lower in their psychological state.
When we visited for the anniversary of the tsunami, we did a very simple thing.
We visited the coastline - from Lepa to Satitoa - and we asked people: do you have enough; is the Government looking after you sufficiently well; and, setting aside the private money from New Zealand and Australia and the money aid agencies themselves have directly brought in, has the aid money your Government received been spent as generously and effectively as you had hoped? In our trip along that coastline we did not meet a single person who answered "yes" to any of these questions. Not one.
I have been a journalist since 1989. I have covered many of the world's major events during that time. And I have learnt that when what I see on the ground is supported by what the people on the ground are telling me, it is almost always the case that the combination of physical evidence and first hand testimony is correct.
But in Samoa, there is a further corroboration of the evidence of my eyes and ears: there is the Government's own figures. In the document Misa Telefoni himself provided us with, there is a ST$100,000,000 discrepancy between what is budgeted to be received and what is budgeted to be spent.
The Samoan Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister can call me what they like, they can imply Claudine Maclean and I am a cynical and ignorant palagi, but shooting the messenger does not alter the fact that neither the Government's own figures, nor what I saw and heard on the coast, go anywhere near towards answering the simple question we came to Samoa to ask: where has the money gone?
During my time covering Samoa, its people and its relationship with New Zealand, I have worked with some of the finest people I have met during my career as a journalist. At the time of the tsunami itself, I found the people I met to be inspirationally generous and brave.
None of what I have said in the past fortnight is a criticism of Samoa and its people.
But, setting aside what aid agencies have achieved around the coastline, and what the private money raised by individual families has also achieved, I am still uncertain about what, exactly, a significant percentage of the Government's money has been spent on?
The people along that coastline deserve the care and help the world intended for them. A year has passed. They deserve it now.
The Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister can say what they like about me and my colleagues. But they still haven't answered our very simple question: where has all the money gone?
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pacific islands media association
pima.nius@gmail.com
aotearoa, new zealand
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