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PNG's next leader must marry old ways with new
Sydney Morning Herald - July 7, 2012
The trucks are dusty from the trip up the potholed road through the mountains. Soon, after a rest for the drivers, they will set off on the shorter, even worse highway into the Southern Highlands to deliver their cargoes of components and supplies to 8000 workers, most of them foreign, who are building a $15 billion liquefied natural gas project for a ExxonMobil-led partnership.
On a good day this part of the trip will take about 12 hours. On a bad day, a day or two. If things are going very bad, it can take a week if local people decide to take a truck and its crew hostage for some alleged grievance or injury, holding it until a ransom is paid or police intervene.
As huge as it is – adding up to 25 per cent to Papua New Guinea's gross domestic product in one jump – the ExxonMobil project is but one of the liquid natural gas projects in the offing. Down in the Papuan Gulf, a similar-size development by the Canadian-owned InterOil is moving close to decision, and Australia's Oil Search is proving up gas finds that support a third.
In Port Moresby, the scruffy capital, project dollars are reflected in spiralling hotel rates now at $450 to $600 a night, and a real-estate boom that sees high-rise condominiums rapidly replacing old colonial-era bungalows on the hills overlooking the Torres Strait at Ela Beach.
Across the island of New Guinea, meanwhile, in the jungles inland from the Bismarck Sea, police teams on Wednesday arrested 39 members of an alleged "cannibal cult". Police say they had been killing perceived village sorcerers who had extorted money from the families of sick people in return for removal of the curses said to cause the illnesses. Cult members, police allege, then drank the victims' blood and ate their body parts to neutralise their magic.
The Bogia region where this happened is only a few hours' drive from Madang, a vigorous trading and tourism centre with a university. The gap between the modern economy, being ramped up by natural gas projects and big mines, and village economies, which barely count in GDP figures, could not be more stark.
As Daniel Kapen, the police senior constable making the arrests, told reporters the cult reflected the lack of basic government services. "It will require specialist help and from people other than police to restore normalcy to the lives of these people," he said.
The machinery supposed to link these two economies, and feed resource money into the education and health services that would dispel belief in magic, is the state of Papua New Guinea. It is barely ticking over, but yesterday had managed to achieve yet again its five-yearly service check.
With voting in all but a few isolated islands and inland villages, this year's election has been rated by observers as, if not an outstanding success, at least not to have failed as many predicted when it started two weeks ago. Although a lot of violence usually occurs after elections, when counts show who wins and loses, security and cheating seems to have been no worse than in 2007 and better than some earlier elections. What's different is the massive increase in campaign spending, with millions of kina being showered on voters, particular the tribal, clan and village hausman (extended family) heads seen as able to deliver "block votes". The syndrome is most intense in the seven highland provinces, who elect 45 of the 111 members of the national parliament and tend to set the political culture for the whole country, often to the dismay of its coastal and island people.
Big money is infusing this culture, absorbing an older system known as the Moka exchange in which contending "big men" built up prestige and power by lavishing gifts of pigs, shells and yams on each other, until one had all the others in a web of unrepayable debt and obligation.
The old and the new can be hard to separate. The Herald came across a large open-air ceremony with a half-dozen large pigs waiting slaughter, in the Dei Open electorate two days before its vote, being presided over by sitting MP Puri Ruing.
"This is not election-related," a clearly irked Mr Ruing insisted. "It's a tribal peace settlement over ownership of a coffee plantation."
The big men of the new parliament began to emerge yesterday with the declaration that the Prime Minister, Peter O'Neill, had won outright in his Southern Highlands seat. Others are likely to include his estranged deputy prime minister, Belden Namah, his vengeful predecessor, Sir Michael Somare, and petroleum minister, William Duma. Two other former prime ministers, Paias Wingti and Sir Julius Chan, are also seeking to re-enter Parliament and if successful, will be influential.
The party leader with the largest number of MPs will be invited by the Governor-General to form a government. Furious numbers work will follow. A veteran businessman describes the process: "The party leaders will kidnap the winners, take them to a resort, put a lot of money in front of them, and offer them ministries." Isolating captive MPs from other offers will be harder this time because of the spread of web-enabled mobile phones.
Mr O'Neill and Mr Namah at least initially would be against each other. Mr Somare says he won't seek the premiership for himself but wants to be a kingmaker and see those responsible for his expulsion from parliament last year jailed for contempt of the Supreme Court rulings reinstating him. A master of coalition formation, Mr Somare may find it hard to transfer the mantle to someone else if he succeeds.
The leader to emerge will indicate the kind of government Papua New Guinea can expect for the next five years.
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