The government earns more than $100 million a year from almost 2 million tons of exported phosphates. The airline Air Nauru a shipping line of half a dozen merchantmen hotels, apartments or other properties in Guam, Saipan, the Marshall Islands and Hong Kong, and joint ventures in phosphate processing in the Philippines and India. One of their newest and biggest investments is a chunk of Hawaii, a Honolulu residential-commercial development project that may ultimately cost a half a billion dollars.Īlso in the Nauruan government investment portfolio: Lion skyscraper-cruder Aussies dubbed it “Bird-Doo Tower'-is one of the Nauruan people’s major assets. “It is true that he is a one-man band,” islander Anthony Detsimea wrote to a regional magazine, “and we like listening to him, for he plays beautiful tunes.”ĭeRoburt spends much of his time with his Australian financial advisers at the 52-story Nauru House in Melbourne, 3,000 miles southwest of here. Other Nauruans sound confident that their financial future is secure in the hands of DeRoburt, a 63-year-old former schoolteacher who has been president almost continuously since the island became independent in 1968, who holds 6 of the 11 Cabinet posts, and who is in charge of the government-owned Nauru Phosphate Corp. “He should be more open with the people.” “The president keeps his own counsel on his investment decisions,” a member of the island Parliament complains privately to a visitor. That’s another of Nauru’s superlatives-it is among the world’s most secretive places. In fact, President Hammer DeRoburt, Nauru’s chief investor, is thinking very deeply about that, but telling very little.

“I think they all trust the government will come up with something.” “Oh, nobody’s really thinking about that,” she says. The Nauruans, digging up and shipping out their little island ton by ton, will run out of phosphates sometime in the early 1990s.Ī government clerk giggles at the question-a typical Nauruan reaction. State Department, in 1981, at $35,000 per person, higher even than Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms. Phosphates give the 4,800 Nauruans the world’s highest per-capita gross national product-last estimated by the U.S.

Don t starve one man band