By Martyn Namorong

A FRIEND OF MINE recently told me about a trip to Mt Hagen. You know there aren’t any mines nor is there any oil or gas exploitation in the Western Highlands Province. But he reckons he saw more 10-seaters in Hagen than they have in Tabubil.

He asked a Kange mate of his why all other Kanges were buying 10-seater Land Cruisers. “Bara yu baim liklik kar ol man bai laf long yu,” he’s mate responded. [If you buy a small car, people will laugh at you]

He then asked how all these Japanese vehicles ended up in Kange Territory when they had no gold or copper mines. “Batz mipela baim kar wantaim moni blong broccoli, cabbage na potaito. Yu save kofi I gat sisen blong em tasol ol kaikai evridei mipla save salim na kisim moni. Wanpela beg potaito em K300. Long wanpela yar yu ken mekim K120,000 na baim kar wantaim cash.” [We buy cars with the money we get from selling vegetables. Coffee has its seasons but we can sell food each and every day.  A bag of potatoes sells for K300. You can make K120,000 a year and buy a car for cash]

I was like, wow! Just listening to my friend telling his tales about the Wild West. Yep its wild, coz 70% of all cases at Mount Hagen Hospital are trauma cases mostly from motor vehicle accidents. You guess what vehicle type is involved.

But to a red-blooded Kange, it’s not the potato or broccoli patch that signifies wealth and status but the 10-seater that he crashes after drinking too much alcohol. Oh yeah, and by the way, the measure of one’s status if also measured in how many litres of beer one buys for one’s friends.

Such a perverted view of wealth is not uniquely Kange nor is it Melanesian; it is indeed a perverted foreign concept.

There are two things that our ancestors fought wars for – land and women. Women produced the next generation of the tribe while land sustained all generations of the tribe.

Real wealth was thus understood as people, their land and their traditional knowledge.  Traditional knowledge was used to utilise the land and resources and every member of the tribe (the tribe’s human resources) contributed to the wellbeing of society.

The systematic destruction of this way of life by both the religious and secular colonisers has led to once independent traditional societies have become dependent on AusAID handouts and Asian Development Bank loans for so called development.

I don’t buy the arguments that the reason I am able to be free is only because of the work of Christian missionaries. That may be slightly true but it does not explain the traditional trade links that existed between different indigenous nations.

The Hiri trade between the Motuan Gulf nations clearly did not need Christian missionaries to facilitate. The Kula, Bilbil and Lapita trades did not need foreign intervention.

Besides, how did the Moka shells end up in the Highlands if people of different indigenous nations did not trade and peacefully interact with each other?

We were not as savage and primitive as depicted by the prejudiced colonisers.

Today, all that one gets bombarded with by in the mediocre press is the political verbal diarrhoea on “foreign investment” and “investor confidence.” For Motuans, trade was about being able to feed the tribe. They didn’t worry about foreign investment, investor confidence, economic growth and private sector development to facilitate wealth creation.

Confused? Well, the Capitalists and their compradors use those fancy terms to impress and confuse you. They make you believe that buying a K120 000 vehicle; getting drunk, crashing the vehicle and ending up in the hospital with a broken hip is good for your ego.

And just in case you’re still confused; a bag of potatoes local consumption is worth about K300. It’s worth more than a bag of cocoa and a tone of oil palm kernel meant for export.

Unsurprisingly, the people who are selling off our country are those who minds have been colonised by the religious and secular colonisers. These are intellectuals who quote texts and authorities that would make their ancestors bones rattle in their graves.

The good ole sheeple call them “save man na meri” [wise men and women] probably because “ol igat gutpla save” to sell off their birthrights for less than peanuts. This explains why there are too many disenfranchised sheeple still believing in a system that has been failing them since the arrival of colonisers.

Panguna produced a civil war, Ok Tedi caused the world’s third largest environmental disaster, and yet many continue to believe that mines are good. This is the epitome of cognitive dissonance in any society.

Indigenous people are supposed to be masters of their destiny. They are supposed to be defining a reality and a vision that is based on home-grown ideals. Instead what has happened is that many minds have been colonised and these colonised minds frame the development agenda from the perspective of the colonizers.

These colonised minds genuinely believe they are serving the national interests when indeed their decisions only benefit the Vultures of Unrestrained Capitalism.

But it’s not all hopelessness for Papua New Guineans. Increasing numbers of people are rightfully questioning the excesses of unrestrained vulture capitalism as witnessed by the recent public outcry over Special Purpose Agriculture Business Leases.

There are growing community concerns over experimental sea bed mining plus the dumping of mine wastes into the Astrolabe Bay.

Having realised that exploitation occurs under the guise of development; environmental degradation occurs under the guise of sustainable management practices and thugs dressed in police uniform protect thieves, indigenous nations are resisting vulture capitalists and their compradors.

Many are now waking up to the reality that their land is already providing jobs for 85% of the population. They now discern that where as vulture capitalist is offering 300 slave-wage jobs; their land is already providing 3000 living-wage jobs.

They realisze that just accepting spin-off benefits is like accepting as payment, the aroma of you own pig while it is being cooked and eaten by others.

The fact that the wealth of many indigenous nations is defined by the land they own has insulated them from the downfall of vulture capitalism elsewhere.