No applause lines for spare parts

Yap's Ganir

Inside the Reef By Joyce McClure

Every few years in Yap, walls get painted. Especially when something important is coming.

They were painted before the 2018 MicroGames. They have been painted again in periodic bursts of civic enthusiasm. For a while, Colonia brightens.

There is nothing wrong with fresh paint. But paint can also be a metaphor.

Ahead of the games, potholes long ignored were suddenly filled with gravel. Rusting vehicles visible from the roadside were hauled away. A derelict barge that had sat for years beside an abandoned World War II-era building disappeared from view. Even the old, condemned waterfront structure itself was brightened with murals before it was eventually demolished.

Yet in the tropics, neglect has a way of returning. Mold creeps up exterior walls. Mildew settles into cupboards, schools and public buildings. Heat, salt air and rain work overtime.

In tropical places, maintenance is not periodic. It is continuous.

For a moment, neglect looked reversible. Then the games ended. And the potholes came back. It was hard not to see a pattern: we tidy for company; governments do too.

That is not uniquely Yap, nor uniquely Pacific. But islands may feel the consequences of deferred maintenance more acutely because replacement is expensive, supply chains are long and there is often no easy redundancy when systems fail.

Painting is presentation. Patching is improvisation. Maintenance is governance.

Yet maintenance is rarely, if ever, a campaign issue. Candidates promise new roads, new facilities, new ports and new grants. They campaign on what can be announced. Rarely on what must be sustained.

No one runs for office promising better spare-parts inventories. No one fills campaign social media pages with drainage maintenance plans. There are a few votes in the grease fittings. Ribbon cuttings and handshakes photograph better.

And yet, the quiet work of upkeep is where competent government actually lives—not in what gets inaugurated, but in what still works ten years later.

To be fair, not every response to decay has been cosmetic. Former Gov. Henry Falan’s push to demolish condemned public properties was a reminder that leadership can move beyond managing appearances and confront deterioration directly.

But even that carries a lesson. Problems deferred long enough return as emergencies. And emergencies cost more.

The cheapest condemned building is the one maintained before demolition becomes the only option. The cheapest pothole is the one repaired before the road fails.

Deferred maintenance is rarely thrift. It is usually expensive procrastination.

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Yap’s outer-island field trip ships tell the same story at a higher cost. The Hapilmohol vessels were welcomed as a development. But ships are not merely assets to acquire. They are systems to sustain. They require maintenance schedules, inventories, repair capacity and—the unheroic but essential detail politicians almost never mention—spare parts.

When a ship breaks down and repairs wait months, sometimes longer, for components, the problem is not simply mechanical. It is a governance problem.

In island communities, ships are highways. When highways stop moving, people get stranded.

Warnings about design suitability and maintenance realities were raised years ago. That was not nitpicking. That was stewardship. Stewardship too often receives less attention than acquisition.

Too often governments celebrate handovers and underfund permanence. They confuse projects with systems. They call recurring failures bad luck. Many are budgeting decisions. The problem is not limited to local government. It shadows donor-funded development too often.

A gift without a maintenance plan can become a liability.

Infrastructure, whether funded from Beijing, Tokyo, Washington or elsewhere, is only as durable as the planning that supports it after the handover. Delivery is not durability. A project is not a maintenance strategy.

Maybe the deeper issue is that maintenance is hard to make politically glamorous. There are no campaign banners for corrosion control. No stump speeches about replacing filters. No applause lines for spare parts.

Maybe there should be.

Because in island places, maintenance is not mundane. It is resilience. It is fiscal prudence. It may even be one measure of sovereignty. A government’s competence is revealed less by what it unveils than by what it quietly keeps working.

Perhaps the boldest campaign promise a candidate could make is not: I will build something new. But: I will keep things working. I will budget for maintenance. I will fix problems before they become emergencies.

That would be a campaign worth hearing. And it might outlast the paint.

Joyce McClure is a former senior marketing executive and former Peace Corps volunteer in Yap. Transitioning to freelance writing, she moved to Guam in 2021 and relocated back to the mainland in 2023. Send feedback to joycemcc62@yahoo.com 

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