Posted on: Monday, June 25, 2001

Editorial
What should we make of OHA performance?

First, let's wish Clyde Namu'o all the best in his new job as the new Office of Hawaiian Affairs administrator. He will need it.

The OHA board members made Namu'o's selection, as has become their habit, a circus: The sitting members rushed to vote Namu'o in when Rowena Akana, an opponent, left the room briefly. A "railroad job," she fumed. It was also the occasion for some profane name-calling and other unceremonious behavior.

"I am terribly disgusted," said one board member. Namu'o's selection "was a mini-overthrow of the Hawaiian nation," complained another, in something of a stretch.

"When is it going to stop?" asked one Hawaiian onlooker, while Auntie Frenchy DeSoto, a former board member and no stranger to participation in this chaotic approach to public service, was "aghast" at what she had witnessed.

"We are being ridiculed," she said. "It is a fiasco."

If we were to say in this space that the OHA board is an embarrassment, we'd be accused of bias or worse. So here you have the members' own words, from which you can draw your own conclusions.