Wantok Fridays: Power Cuts, MOUs, Team-Bonding and A Summit for Q3 of 2024.

By William Kadi

It’s great to witness a break-dancing competition combined with youth and mental health awareness on a chill Sunday night, streamed live on Facebook. Watching Honiara’s multipurpose hall packed with music, noise and energetic routines really sets the tone for a new week. Also noteworthy is the Tinakula festival, a celebration of Temotu culture, continuing through the weekend and into the new week. Meanwhile, Guadalcanal Province is gearing up to celebrate its second appointed day on Thursday, August 1, 2024, with high spirits.

This week, Honiara is quite windy, which helps to clear out the humidity. A stroll around the streets might give you a taste of that Freddie Mercury experience – "Another One Bites the Dust"! You just need to look left and right to that Queen rhythm. Plus, it's easy to smile in Honiara – first, because of the blazing sun, and second, because the streets always have something unexpectedly entertaining and funny to offer.

The trick to living in Honiara is to ‘never be rigid’ because it’s always a great place to laugh about life.

Power cuts are more frequent this week and that’s not electrifying at all! However, congratulations to Solomon Power for signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Country’s national broadcaster, SIBC. The MOU is for a collaboration between SIBC and SolPower for a 5MW solar farm. Let’s hope it comes online whilst we wait for Tinahydro. SIBC has the land and wants to supply to the grid and SolPower appears willing to buy that capacity and is open to providing support on the technical know-how. The significance of this news from my view is that the wholesale electricity market is unbundling, showing signs and characteristics of a liberalized market. This also means demand is increasing, so additional capacity on the supply side is encouraging the market to open up.

It’s also an exciting week for our Honiara Office as we welcome a brief visit from our Melbourne-based PLN colleague, Dirk Heinz. I’m sure a few solbrew helped my colleague brush off the humidity as we reflected on some notable matters we worked on many moons ago, including the Wagina proceeding. In the coming months, we are also preparing to take on more community legal engagements as pro bono services. PALS, as the Solomon Islands’ affiliate to the broader PLN network, continues to work closely with our regional counterparts to ensure we deliver our work effectively on the ground.

On the development front, China’s ongoing commitment towards infrastructure development in Auki, Malaita and nation-wide is receiving a renewed commitment. Australia’s equipment support to airport development and its ongoing support for the Women’s Development Division under the Ministry of Women, Youth, Children and Family Affairs is also worth a mention. Much needed capacity development by way of providing equipment with technical training for customs officers also reflects the continuous commitment of Australia, and these were just some of the many mid-week highlights. An interesting outcome of the Prime Minister’s recent visit to China is the signing of three protocols targeting specific market demand, which aims to deviate from logging and focus on agriculture products and the marine sector. We'll follow up on this more next week.

As part of the 100 days plan for the current government, the National Economic Summit is taking place from 31st July to 1st August 2024. This summit allows the government to strategically consult with stakeholders across key sectors to align and develop its 4-year policy direction and priorities, with the goal of growing growing the economy.

Guadalcanal Province also celebrated their second appointment day on Thursday, 1st August 2024. We are grateful for the people of Guadalcanal for hosting our key economic hub and capital, Honiara, on their land.

As the weekend sets in, cover bands, music artists, and DJs are setting up playlists with the trending flava and Solomon music classics to welcome the first weekend of the new month as we sail deep into Q3 of 2024.