A Nice Bastard Until The Brain Explosion!

Written by Seuamuli Des Bentin
Wednesday, 16 April 2008
If reports of Tana Umaga’s brain explosion on a rugby field in France, is anything to go by, trained gentlemen can suffer a relapse and return to former ungentlemanly behavior, from time to time. Rich rugby club owners should be aware of that and take at least half a million dollars off their contracts at the time of negotiations for it. I had a bit of a giggle when I heard of young Ben of Star 96FM and popular “On The Bench” sports program fame being mildly reprimanded by his boss for watching the Tana red card incident on U-Tube because it was not job related. That’s what could happen when you do both sports and ‘beauty tips’ and confuse people and the bwana! But you could probably, at a stretch, argue that Tana’s dreadlocked look qualifies under ‘beauty tips’ as so last decade when the latest craze is for straightened, unnaturally black hair with the bit over one eye. Probably not for very highly paid macho rugby player-coaches though eh? Even for France and the fashionable French. Anyway, Tana trying to out-French the French in terms of arrogance reminded me of the many times that I have been blinded by brain explosions, the most prolonged and unfortunate being the one that convinced me that I could write an interesting newspaper column about absolutely nothing under the hip sixty-ish title of “Power To The People!” Now, I am too scared to do a Mika Kelekolio and just say that I will no longer be writing the weekly half-a-page-of-nonsense in case nobody missed it! I am like a government stuck with an unfortunate and embarrassing alliance with a rich super power that demands it publicly announce its support for human rights abuses or the river of money will dry up. I am like a Member of Parliament who cannot vote against an unpopular party policy because I could be asked to resign losing hundreds of thousands of tala in income. Except that I am not getting money for writing this. I forfeited that after the Newsline premises got burnt to the ground last year. The point is I am not just an arrogant bastard. I am a nice arrogant bastard! The title of “Power To The People” was not taken from the John Lennon song of the same name or from “Wolfie” the popular English television series of the Seventies, but was simply from the Electric Power Corporation’s Rural Electrification Project. Taking ‘power’ to the people increased consumption and demand and should have meant more revenue. The Electric Power Corporation is still owed millions in unpaid accounts. The power to pay or not to pay is indeed with the people! Pre-paid telephone cards have paved the way for Cash Power thingies to be installed in all households. They should have been installed more than ten years ago. It is not new technology. People do not have a problem with paying for a telephone call before they have made it, but somehow expect power to be free or to be paid for when they have the money. A former Minister of the Electric Power Corporation once asked me if I thought the then proposed purchase of about a quarter of a million talas worth of Auto re-closers would solve the problem of chronic power blackouts at the time. I said that they wouldn’t because the problem was at the power station at Ta’elefaga where flashover between the VT’s caused the circuit breakers to trip out with the remaining power stations at Lalomauga, Tanugamanono, Samasoni, Alaoa, and Fale ole Fe’e unable to take up the extra load. Blackouts continued to plague the people even after the auto reclosers had been purchased and installed. In fact, I thought they made things worse. The one that was installed at Si’umu tripped every time they did any switching at Savaia. The result of course was the purchase and installation of standby generators at the Government Buildings, National Provident Fund Building as well as other buildings and businesses. It was a good time for those in the standby generator business. Whether they still start up automatically when the power fails probably hasn’t been tested by the building managers for a while. As for the expensive Auto re-closers, I hear that they will be removed to be replaced by automatic circuit breakers to be controlled from wherever the new Control Center will be located. Available and affordable radio technology and SCADA (Systems for Control And Data Acquisition) can give the system operators controls and real time status information that will make their lives easier. The guys at Vaitele will not have to go flying around in RHD traffic to open and close breakers manually anymore either. When government organizations make a mistake and lose money, we seldom hear about it. If the newspapers latch on to the story and ask questions, we seldom get any answers. The quarter of a million tala spent on the auto reclosers is small potatoes compared to the losses incurred by the SNPF on the disastrous coconut oil venture. Four million on the Aleipata wharf sounds reasonable if the research has proven that the numbers are there to support it. But no doubt about it. The ‘overwhelming majority’ are being given every opportunity to grow and prosper. I still do not see why they should drive on the other side of the road to achieve this though. See you at the protest march tomorrow folks! Comments (0) Subscribe to this comment's feed Write comment Name Email Title Comment

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