DEPUTY Prime Minister Bradley Smokey Tovosia is believed to have accepted in-principle a decision to relinquish the Ministry of Mines, Energy and Rural Electrification (MMERE) portfolio with a condition.
The Minister wants his proxy to be the new MMERE Minister, mining industry sources confided in Solomon Star this week, implying that nothing would change.
A proxy is a person or thing that is given the power to act on behalf of someone else. In other words, a proxy is a person who is authorised to act on behalf of another person, such as by voting for them in an election. For example, you might nominate someone to act as your proxy if you can’t be available to vote.
The change is certain to expose an even bigger problem, that of creating a “them and us” political factions within the ruling GNUT coalition. The new development could, for example expose political support within.
And it all comes down to the market share in the hardware industry, which has already split the industry in two. The first group is made up of older Chinese who have engaged in hardware trading for many, many years in Solomon Islands.
That group, according to sources, are fighting to protect the industry from newer, aggressive players with an assortment of electronic gadgetry to influence the market.
It has been accused of spearheading the 10-point Memorandum of Demands (MoD) on Prime Minister Jeremiah Manele.
Implicit in the MoD is the demand that PM Manele remove former Prime Minister, now Minister of Finance and Treasury, Manasseh Sogavare along with the Deputy Prime Minister Bradley Tovosia from the Mines portfolio.
The question now is will he do it?
It is understood that former Prime Minister Sogavare and Minister Tovosia are in an alliance intent on breaking the stranglehold on the current hardware industry.
Their stand is backed by reports that the Government injected some SBD19 billion into the hardware industry over the last five years.
One estimate said eighty per-cent of this amount left the country.
One such new arrival is BNBM Hardware & Home Centre, a subsidiary of CNBM which is the largest manufacturer of building materials in China. BNBM is being described as the leading integrated service provider throughout the world.
CNBM is an acronym for China National Building Material Company Ltd. It is a manufacturing company specialising in building materials including cement, ready-mix concrete, gypsum board, glass fibre, wind blades and many more.
CNBM is present in 76 countries around the world, employing nearly 200, 000 people, according to published reports.
In the Pacific, the company has branches and subsidiaries in Australia, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu.
Solomon Islands is CNBM’s latest addition in the Pacific. Its presence in Honiara is being seen as a real threat to the market share of existing hardware operations.
CNBM’s foothold in the door only amplifies the fear by existing hardware operations of being wiped out altogether through a do or die competition.
Whether the new outfit will behave any differently remains debatable.
By Alfred Sasako
