PAPUA NEW GUINEA: NOT THE SOCIETY I KNEW

I feel a stranger in this land. This is not the country of thirty years ago. The rule of law is crumbling to be replaced by overriding greed.

The cult of the clan and individual now dominates often with just one consideration to steal whatever money comes their way.

People can kill for little or no reason at all. The police can not stop the carnage as many of them are drunk and involved. We dare not give the police more power.

In parts of PNG, the police are outgunned and lack transport. Fear of police authority has given way to the power of automatic weapons.

Violence is endemic from the official levels down. Many of us have seen the NCDC thugs patrolling the streets and harassing ordinary citizens. They carry long wooden or iron sticks with which to dispense violence.

Mob rule is taking over from the rule of law. We see this in villages and in schools where male students have formed mobs to fight students in other schools.

Authority of teachers has dropped. Killings in villages are being copied in schools and colleges. Boys will start to graduate from schools to gaols. That is not what is supposed to happen.

At the bottom of it all is the boom conditions of LNG and the corruption of the DSIP slush fund of some K19 million given out annually to politicians.

Villages are starting to know that the only way to get access is to have their own politician elected. Otherwise they are likely to get nothing. So the wantok slush fund will be worth killing for and intimidating voters and candidates at election time.

The slush fund is being used primarily for the needs of wantoks in the towns and villages. Why build a bridge and road into that area? They are our traditional enemies. Besides they did not vote for me.

Schools are being closed by landowners demanding payment for the land on which the school was built. There seems to be no understanding that the children from the landowner villages are among those who have attended that school for over half a century.

In the media, there seems to be little good news and mainly focus on grand theft and murder. We read of killings page after page followed by millions of kina in a fund somewhere that has just disappeared.

With the decline in the health system, the incidence of sorcery killings is rising. This has to have a negative effect on village health awareness.

There is the implied belief that people can live forever to have their lives cut short, not by HIV/AIDS, not by malaria, not by tuberculosis but by sorcery. Someone has to die to take the blame for the villager who died.

There was an expatriate woman who recently came to PNG with the ideological bias that sorcery killings are gender based and focused on women.

She did not understand so much about sorcery, particularly in the distribution of women and men between matrilineal and patrilineal areas. It is not about just killing women. Villagers know more about who is involved in sorcery than they are prepared to admit.

There is no fairness in killings. A person may be attacked and defend himself. It does not mean that the attackers will retire and go on with their lives.

They still have to come back in greater numbers to kill the victim. Recently a man was killed in an argument about a hand of bananas. A retired Supreme Court judge now writes a column in the media advising that in a killing all involved can be charged.

And on top of all this, Papua New Guinea has to contend with overseas advisors who come to these shores at great expense to spread the gospel that people have rights, rights and more rights. They have no responsibilities.

How many school children believe in rights and no responsibilities? This message is destroying the authority of parents and teachers.