By UPNG Insider on PNG Blogs

This week the Student Representative Council (SRC) of the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) naively played into the hands of Peter O’Neill who is in the process of enrichening himself and his business partners beyond belief through doubtfully legal “middleman commissions” , “hidden buys of oil company shares”, “hidden ownerships of companies that benefit from government contracts” and “secret kickbacks into overseas accounts”. All these tricks have long been practiced by the most corrupt politicians in this country . O’Neill is only perfecting the techniques and using several at once in his attempt to become PNG’s first billionaire.

Over the past weeks, O’Neill has been in a boxing match with UPNG students.  In contrast to the knockout he suffered from his earlier fight with students from the PNG University of Technology (Unitech) , O’Neill now has a victory to claim.   He came out victorious against the UPNG students .

Unitech students won the fight against O’Neill because of the sheer brilliance of their strategy.  Unitech SRC created a protest that stayed unified and used actions that frightened the government into submission .  They would not give in or compromise their strategy no matter how intense the government pressure became.  They would not sit down and negotiate with the government and all meetings had to have many witnesses.  They did not give government the slightest excuse to send in police and take over Unitech by enforcing a strong nonviolence approach.   All this made the Unitech movement a powerful and frightening force, in comparison to the UPNG pussycat movement

The fear that made O’Neill give in to Unitech students completely was that Unitech’s energy would infect other universities as well as anti corruption groups in PNG.  He feared a growing national movement against corruption that would topple his government.  In the end, O’Neill had little choice but to give in to everything the Unitech students wanted .   Even the last minute government trick to have the triumphant Unitech VC made into a figurehead without power was abandoned under student pressure.

Once Unitech's energy was dissipated by giving in to their demands, the next step in the ame was to buy out the UPNG SRC.

Unlike the Unitech SRC, the UPNG SRC was easy for O'Neill to defeat. UPNG SRC’s “mature approach” gave O’Neill breathing space and enough time to puncture the anti corruption tyres.  How O'Neill got UPNG SRC to sell out is uncertain, but bribery, past and promised (including O'Neill’s gift of the bus to UPNG SRC!) are suspect.  In truth, the UPNG SRC had no excuse to repeat old mistakes.  They were in close contact with the Unitech SRC and could see for themselves how Unitech SRC was being effective .  They knew that the petition submitted to government by the 2013 Unitech SRC achieved nothing.  Why the UPNG SRC purposely followed the failed approach now becomes a matter of great suspicion.

In the end, O’Neill did not have have to offer UPNG students a single concession.  Everything he said the government was doing had already been forced by others, not by UPNG student action.

O’Neill applauds what UPNG SRC did and will encourage any future university student strategy he knows won’t work.  Petitions are time wasters, loved by corrupt leaders .  They can be accepted “with pleasure”, “seriously reviewed and carefully considered”, and when enough time has passed, quietly thrown away as will happen with the UPNG petition.   The UPNG SRC followed this failed strategy either through stupidity or secret intent to give in to Peter O’Neill.

To get UPNG students to foolishly believe their protest achieved anything at all, O’Neill called their approach “mature and sensible” and went on further: “I can confidently say that the student’s leaderships have come of age, which is indeed a positive development for the country.” “I am sure that other higher learning institutions in the country will learn from your leadership and thus conduct debate on issues of national importance in the same sensible and orderly manner”.

It is the Unitech, not the UPNG example that is revealing that “sensible and orderly manner” is a secret code term meaning doing things ineffectively.  O’Neill’s misinformation messages to the PNG people are that the Unitech movement was a failure and the UPNG movement was a step forward, when the truth is exactly opposite. Do we not remember a similar piece of misinformation when Minister Delilah Gore declared to all PNG that the Unitech boycott and activism was unprecedented in the history of the world?   Maybe the O’Neill government will someday wake up and realise that educated Papua New Guineans are not stupid and don’t buy into misinformation of the kind the O’Neill government gives out .

When Unitech students woke up to the fact that their SRC had sold them out and secretly joined the side of the government in 2013, indications from Facebook alone is that they did not accept their SRC’s decision.  Concerned activist students started rebelling against their SRC and eventually got SRC officers to do what the activists wanted .

Our eyes now turn to UPNG and its students.  Will they continue to let themselves be manipulated by their SRC into naively believing anything but failure and wasted time has been achieved so far for the PNG movement against corruption.  Historically UPNG was always considered the leader in progressiveness, with Unitech far behind.  Now it is UPNG who needs to follow the leader.