Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 21, Number 6, 1 June 2004 — Financial struggles [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Financial struggles

With reference to the letter to the editor last month entitled "Trustees Ignore Youth" by "Liki Boi from Maui," my concurrence and sympathies with his statements, for my family and I have gone through the same situation when I, too, was a starving college student trying to get a higher education in the 1960s. The future of the Native Hawaiian people is in the vision and dreams of its young, not the misguided old - who historically got the Kanaka Maoli to the sad state of affairs we're presently in. As a retired bank and high-tech electrical engineering executive, I would like to encourage "Liki Boi" to continue his engineering studies at UCLA in order to improve his life, as well as his family's on Maui. After all, I successfully did it on my own 45 years ago on the mainland. With the exception of OHA Trustee Rowena Akana, I guess the proverbial management "Peter Principle" is alive and well at OHA, where incompetence is rewarded and fiduciary financial accountability is non-existent. How ean anyone justify mismanaging OHA's finaneial portfolio and being rewarded with a 28 percent salary increase? In the real corporate business world, those executives accountable would have been fired or terminated. Reputable Wall Street financial professionals and investment bankers should have been managing OHA's investment portfolio, not rank amateurs and loeal financial "wannabes." And meanwhile "Liki

Boi" continues to struggle financially to earn an engineering degree at UCLA, without OHA's or Kamehameha Schools' kōkua! William Kuamo'o Scottsdale , AZ

KA I FO Kaiāiiiii

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