Technology Bougainvilleans Outweighing Real Bougainvilleans

By Leonard Fong Roka

Ever since walking through the gates of Divine Word University, I had being exporting my thinking heaps through the social media for the world to see. Face book and blogs I had recently employed to spew my dreams.

Technology Bougainvillean

Alongside me, there are also many Bougainvilleans that one cannot hear or see them in any one place on Bougainville belching out verbal fire in a meeting place of the VAs, CoEs, the District Administration or any open forum held in the villages and so on across Bougainville.

Thus, for many of us, our medium of expressing our thoughts is the many social networking sites provided for us by the IT (Information Technology) revolution recently.

Sadly, as I export my dreams I often feel uneasy to myself about the question: Are my people across Bougainville receiving my thoughts? It is a question that pesters me!

Across Bougainville not all can access the internet. However, with the entry of Digicel, there is accessibility to internet through mobile phones and modems.

Politicking is fun, but the actual execution of our thoughts through pragmatic decision making is another issue that one as to fight for. This is because it is easy for us to dream; but, for us to realize that dream, it is so brutally difficult.

I can bombard the Face book or my blog Leonard Fong Roka with every reasonable thoughts I make, but am I sure my physical characteristic display that to my people when I am amongst my people in Bougainville? Do my actions speak what I write about Bougainville politics?

Many Bougainvilleans by observation speak politics away from home. This is sad. At home, we drink and con people; get into many social ills with our people thus our words don’t really reflect our IT politics. Thus, this is fruitless politics whereby people are just laughing at us.

After our holidaying, we fly back into our safe haven in any corner of Papua New Guinea and get back into the air.

Who is our subject here, these New Guineans? These people have their own problems like the tribal fights and the booming natural resource extraction industries that are robbing them to worry about.

Our Solomon island of Bougainville has its own unique chaos. We are adopting corruption, crime, suppression of our own people and so on fast enough that soon we will be conflicting amongst ourselves.

Thus, as we politics in the IT world, we must also politic on the ground as Bougainvilleans. Your gods will never walk amongst us to help us free ourselves; it is you and I who can write the very positive lines to put those lines of words back into action where our people can appreciate us and our dreams.

Politicking without action on Bougainville will result in further divisions when we create, by the power of our visionary words, men so laden with the many theories of politics we post in the social media.

So, apply our thoughts in Bougainville and not in the IT world of so much fantasy.