Vanuatu’s capital is a ghost town — some say it might be ‘finished’

Vanuatu has been in a perpetual state of recovery.

How many disasters can one nation take?

It was meant to be the crowning symbol of China’s deepening ties with Vanuatu.

A $31 million, sprawling presidential palace complex, built and donated by Beijing, atop a prime hill in Vanuatu’s seaside capital Port Vila.

Instead, it has become a cracked symbol of the mounting problems facing one of the world’s most vulnerable and disaster-prone countries.

Less than a year after being handed over in a lavish ceremony, the palace complex is riddled with damage.

And much like large parts of the capital, it’s abandoned.

“You can see cracks all over,” Wilson Thomas Iauma, a private secretary to Vanuatu’s president, told the ABC.

“In the end, who is to be blamed?”

It is now more than three months since a devastating 7.3 magnitude quake struck Port Vila.

It killed 14 people and impacted an estimated 80,000 lives across the country.

It flattened buildings, crushed cars and turned homes into rubble.

The CBD largely remains a ghost town, as a conga line of condemned buildings across the city wait to be demolished.

The devastating earthquake, one of the country’s worst, came on the back of three destructive cyclones that ripped through the country in 2023, pushing the people of Vanuatu into an almost perpetual state of recovery.

And as they continue to pick up the pieces, one big question lingers:

What’s next?

Disaster looms around the corner

To the naked eye, the damage to the presidential palace could be considered light compared to other buildings post-earthquake.

Yet, it is still marred with severe structural cracks — what the Vanuatu Chinese embassy calls “inevitable cosmetic damage” following the earthquake.

According to Thomas Iauma, the building was “not built to code” — a claim the Chinese Embassy strongly denies.

“There is no wire mesh and there’s thin steel wires to reinforce the concrete wall,” Mr Iauma said.

Earlier this month, Vanuatu’s prime minister told the ABC that China has offered to cover the cost of repairing five key projects built with its aid money — to the tune of $4 million — including the presidential palace.

And Chinese government engineers were on the ground in Port Vila this week, after Beijing sent experts to assist with structural research and safety assessments earlier this year.

Regardless, the palace itself is just one small element of the fierce debate across Vanuatu over who is to blame — and who should foot the post-earthquake repair bill, estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

It comes as Vanuatu grapples with a looming economic crisis and chronic political instability, with snap elections held less than a month after the earthquake struck.

Many parts of the country were still experiencing tremors and aftershocks during the vote.

And the memory of that fateful day when earthquake hit remains fresh in people’s minds.

“It’s beyond belief,” Willie Tokon, the head of Transparency International Vanuatu, told the ABC.

And yet, despite it all, the people of Vanuatu refuse to give up hope.

The ABC spent a week documenting their resilience and strength, as the nation navigates the daunting prospect of rebuilding yet again.

All this as the threat of another natural disaster looms around the corner.

‘Maybe this town is finished’

Vanuatu is among the most disaster-prone countries on the planet.

It’s a low-lying Pacific Island nation sitting within the Ring of Fire: a horseshoe-shaped tectonic belt of volcanoes that borders the Pacific Ocean and one of the most seismically active zone in the world.

As a result, Vanuatu regularly experiences frequent earthquakes, regular cyclones and unexpected tsunamis.

And that’s without mentioning over nine active volcanoes, all of which have forced the relocation of thousands of people within the last few years.

But despite multiple destructive events in recent times, many Ni-Vanuatu say last year’s earthquake was different: not only because it was so powerful, but it struck at a shallow depth, just 35 kilometres west of Efate island where the capital Port Vila sits.

Critical infrastructure, including hospitals, bridges, and water reservoirs, suffered extensive damage, plunging Vanuatu into a state of emergency.

And in an island country with a population of only 320,000 — 50,000 of whom live in Port Vila — almost everyone has a story of survival, including this reporter, Lillyrose Welwel.

‘The whole building shook’

I was born and raised in Vanuatu, and have experienced many disasters — but this was different.

Fortunately, the earthquake struck during the school holidays and while many office workers were out for lunch.

While some areas are now reopening, many parts of Port Vila’s CBD remain closed, and the streets are eerily quiet.

Vanuatu’s recovery office said it could be years until the area was functioning normally.

A major landslide from the cliff above Port Vila’s wharf has left the road along the dock unusable, and there are no plans to reopen it.

And for those still working in the cliff’s shadow, there lingers a sense of foreboding, that the rocks on the hill can fall at any time.

But across town, engineers say there are two categories of buildings that fared disastrously in the earthquake: older buildings that weren’t necessarily designed with seismic activity in mind, and new ones that some suspect were not designed according to Vanuatu’s building code.

“We’ve got the biggest cyclones and we’ve got quite severe earthquakes,” self-employed Ni-Vanuatu engineer Cyrille Mainguy said.

“The problem we see is we’ve got people coming from overseas, with plans done overseas … and they’re mainly building concrete frames … there’s no reinforcement in the block work.”

Cyrille — who lost his cousin in the earthquake — is referring to the classroom destruction seen at Malapoa College in Port Vila, which was built and gifted to Vanuatu by the Chinese government in 2018.

“To them, those blocks are just partition walls, but to me, a block that falls on a kid will kill that person,” Cyrille said.

The Chinese embassy in Vanuatu told the ABC that China-aided projects are “designed to withstand 8-magnitude earthquakes and constructed according to building code” while flagging Beijing’s cooperation with the Vanuatu government’s recovery is close and ongoing.

“It could be any project: anything that comes into Vanuatu should follow proper process and be signed off by certified engineers.”

Demolish and rebuild?

Three months on, the city is still demolishing major buildings and the rebuilding phase remains a distant prospect.

Everyday unstable buildings pose a real risk to people’s lives.

Rose Taoun’s house now lives in the shadows of one of these blocks — Vanuatu’s Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources — and she said she was afraid to sleep.

“We are scared … but what can we do? I don’t know how we live like this,” the 60-year-old widow and grandmother said.

After surviving the initial quake, aftershocks repeatedly sent her and her family running outside as bricks and debris fell on their home.

George Lapi works for a drinks distribution business.

While checking on the company’s coolers across town, he was shocked by the widespread destruction.

“This is pulling Vanuatu backwards — 30, 40, 50 years back,” he said.

“Maybe it’s best to relocate and turn [the CBD] into a park.”

Foreign loans and debt

Despite significant aid coming from Australia, China, New Zealand and elsewhere, Vanuatu lacks the resources and equipment needed for recovery efforts.

Meanwhile, the nation is already burdened by public debt, estimated to be roughly half the country’s GDP — with 80 per cent of it being external.

Making matters worse, it is estimated that 95 per cent of Vanuatu’s population doesn’t have insurance.

Beyond earthquake recovery and future-proofing, Vanuatu is struggling with inflation, declining foreign investments, skill shortages and a loss of confidence among business owners.

It’s also had one of the worst post-pandemic tourism recoveries in the Pacific, which contributed to the country’s national airline collapsing last year.

Many are wondering whether more loans and more debts are really the answer.

“[Foreign loans are] funding that we have to repay,” Transparency International Vanuatu head Willie Tokon said.

‘The future is ours’

The country ran through three prime ministers in four months last year.

And after snap elections in January, former director-general of climate change, Jotham Napat, was elected prime minister — the country’s fifth leader since late 2022.

Mr Napat is optimistic about Vanuatu’s future — and he has some ideas.

“Given the magnitude of the damage, maybe we could turn the CBD into a more tourism kind of a business, and focus on putting the other main infrastructures in other places.

“We are looking at every option — every option that is available.”