Personal Views on Papua New Guinea

Leonard Fong Roka

People who so love this country call it ‘the land of the unexpected’. Of course, considering it today, I see that this phrase is really true in all aspects of PNG’s daily existence.

PNG flag (worldatlas.com)

PNG is truly a land that even its own citizens and politicians just cannot predict its next move; unstable I believe are Australians also about the future of their buffer state steaming at a stone throw up north.

It was the post WW2 anti-colonial movements that exerted pressure on Australian leadership that granted independence to PNG. I think so often that, the 1930 economic depression and the impacts of the world war had a sequential experience to Aussies how painful it was to manage a vast empire. Australia, being a former member of the British Empire knew the fall of its master.

Thus, in the unpredictable climate of the Cold War, Australia was so swift to rid itself from a large land area of Papua New Guinea that ought to be costly if war broke out.

On the PNG side, again the politicians were excited by the anti-colonial movements across the globe where people fought or struggled to form their own states rather than being kept as possessions by the colonial powers.

PNG leaders fall in love with this and missed out the fundamental business of creating a state of ‘oneness and order’ for the future betterment.

From my viewpoint, PNG politicians—and we know who they are—neglected education, that is, a real Papua New Guinean system of education. A education that would turn its citizen know themselves, know their land, know their history and so on. Instead, leaders adopted a system that created a citizen that does not appreciate themselves as a unique Pacific islander.

Rather than concentrating on developing a PNG oriented education or I should call it the ‘foundation building process’, PNG ran for economic development; a development that was capitalist and ‘miraculous’ but exploitative and suppressive.

With fast-money at hand from the Panguna mine in the Solomon island of Bougainville and Australian aid, PNG by-passed the basic rule of development: ‘THINK BIG but START SMALL’.

Equality of participation and ownership of development across the country that would have being energized and created by down-stream processing was ignored because of the capitalist one-big-project approach to power the whole economy.

This foolish drive is all backed by DEMOCRACY! So PNG went purely democratic and forgot its Melanesian values. These were the values that empowered the people to exist on their island of New Guinea long before the European infiltrators and liars arrived on their land.

All these, created migration (of course was created earlier by the colonial administration) of people in search of opportunities of employment and good living that created such things as the Bougainville crisis.

Bougainville crisis, on the other hand is a justified case because Bougainvilleans are Solomon islanders thrown off from their place by colonialism. Thus, they have the right to irredentism or nationalism. They had being suppressed and exploited for the good of Papua New Guinea for far too long.

Happy Bougainvillean

But in PNG where there are hundreds of conflicting cultures, turning back to the past need powerful leaders like the one in Fiji that are able to stand the sting of democratic beasts, that is the power system of the world so centered in the western interest of exploitation.

In our country of systemic and systematic corruption, I wonder if things will be fine, for the time for change is fast fading. We cannot say that problems are signs of positive change as the Europeans did. Europeans developed when the world’s natural resources were plentiful.

Today resources for development had being depleted. Maybe, by the time PNG’s politics reaches maturity and stability, all gas or gold will be gone to the Asians.

So, my Bougainvilleans think.

We will not alone survive on Melanesian Ways; or western capitalism and liberal democracy, but a marriage of all these concepts or ideologies.

Change must start now or it will never and we will fuck each other attached to the tether of Europeans when our vital natural resources are gone.

I will be gone by then, but I am worried for my children’s’ future.