Book Excerpt: The survival of the Maldives as a nation

Of all the climate-related questions I’d neglected to ask for five years, one stood out above the rest. It was a question that few seemed to want to ask – not on the resorts and not at the political rallies. As the seas rise, how long can the islanders really stay on the islands?

While promoting The Island President in 2012, after Nasheed had wasted valuable moments explaining the coup to David Letterman, his host suggested that mitigating carbon emissions had proven to be a hopeless endeavour, and that adaptation was the only option. Nasheed had already made global headlines by suggesting his government was looking to buy new land overseas, but in reality, there was no solid policy for another Dhivehi Raajje, just as there’s no policy for another planet earth.

‘One of the women from the islands told me, “Mr President, I could go to wherever I want to, but where would the butterflies, the sounds and where would the colours go?”’ he told Letterman. ‘You can always take a people, but it’s very difficult to take a culture.’

The documentary had formed part of Nasheed’s campaign of principled leadership on the climate crisis, with Riz once describing him as ‘Mandela/Captain Planet’. While some of his opponents had tried to make the issue a political one, it was a role he’d inherited from Maumoon, who’d warned the UN General Assembly twenty-five years earlier that the actions of the few now threatened his nation with catastrophe. Key to this leadership had been Nasheed’s commitment to become the world’s first carbon-neutral nation by 2020. Though removing its 0.003 per cent share of global emissions was the very definition of symbolic, it was also a reminder that this is not a crisis of the Maldives’ making. When Nasheed’s chat with Letterman inevitably returned to politics, he’d suggested the new regime lacked the moral credibility to lead the climate fight.

Indeed, the approach of Raees Yameen’s government to the problem had been familiarly self-serving. On World Environment Day in 2015, a typically hubristic Adeeb told journalists that Maldivians would still be on the islands 500 years from now: ‘We will live here in the Maldives even if we have to reclaim land or live on floating contraptions,’ he explained, all the while secretly draining state coffers of vital ‘floating contraption’ funds.

‘With Nasheed it was a dream,’ Environment Minister Thoriq Ibrahim told the Guardian. ‘We do not need cabinet meetings underwater. We do not need to go anywhere. We need development.’ Efforts had continued to lure back outside investors — essential for the transition to renewable energy — as well as projects for integrated water management, sanitation and coastal protection. But the ruthless rush to build the country’s way out of the crisis smacked of old-school transactional politics, lacking the credibility or sincerity required for transformational leadership. Not only had the pledge for carbon neutrality been scrapped, Yameen had entered office promising to drill for oil in the archipelago. This had been Riz’s final published story.

As Naj and I had toured the South, we’d seen the government’s monotonous mantra of tharaggee (development) on every island: land reclamation, sewerage systems, desalination plants, Chinese-built flats and harbour upgrades. All were planned to be finished, or at least ‘inaugurated’, during Yameen’s 2018 election campaign. This included an airport ploughed through the precious Kulhudhuffushi mangroves and, most importantly, the $210 million China–Maldives Friendship Bridge — the nation’s first — joining Malé and Hulhumalé. It was made clear that island projects were dependent on party membership, and understood that vital government jobs required civil servants to bend the knee, and even to attend party rallies. On most islands, everything that couldn’t move had been painted pink, although the yellow-flagged independence of the fishermen still fluttered from most mas dhonis. When the First Lady, Madam Fathun, travelled to Addu for the 2017 local elections, wads of cash — described pithily by our Yameen as ‘fuck-you envelopes’ — were tactlessly shoved into the hands of those invited to meet her. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and feudal kleptocrats could see only political opportunity in these vulnerable islands.

Excerpted with permission from Descent into Paradise by Daniel Bosley @2023 by Pan Macmillan India

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