Paralysis in the Land of the Sukudunumi God

By Monday Tanari*

Last week, the people of Tunisia in Africa rose against their dictator, running him and his family out of the country and looting the great wealth they left behind. In Europe, thousands of Albanians took to the streets, fed up with the status quo. And in Egypt, there have been massive protests against President Hosni Mubarak. These movements are only the latest in a long string that have toppled many unjust governments. In recent years, people power revolutions have occurred in the Philippines as well as in next door Indonesia. They can pop up everywhere. But not today in PNG.

Why not? Some say that it’s because Michael Somare is no dictator and thus, not that bad. While in a strict legal sense that may be true, Somare and his NA mob have managed the same ballot stuffing and vote stealing that dictators often use to stay in power.

On top of that Somare uses his top deputy dog, Jeffrey Nape, to manipulate Parliamentary rules with contempt, thus preventing votes of no confidence from even being discussed.

When you’re in control of the ballot box and the speakers seat, while buying the loyalty of your most important ministers, staying in power becomes relatively easy. And don’t think PNG’s NEC meetings are much different that what we might find in, say, North Korea.

Somare calls the shots while those sitting around him (including the allegedly ethical Carol Kidu) either nod their heads in agreement or look down at the table in silence.

Can we look at all this and call it democracy? More like dictatorship! But actually it’s anarchy, because the PM himself has complained that his Ministers (and bureaucrats below them) commonly ignore NEC directives and do pretty much what they want, starting with ‘compensation’ cheques given to smiling lawyers at the Dept. of Finance. We mostly grumble at the situation.

Michael Somare has been PM for the last 8 years and 8 additional years before that. No freely elected leader manages that kind of track record these days, but Michael Somare had a plan. Find the 1991 issue of Pacific Island Monthly magazine where he states in an interview that PNG needed a benevolent dictator and he was willing to serve. The dream is now reality and Michael Somare is the self-proclaimed Sukudunumi God of PNG.

A few educated citizens say that they’d join a PNG people power movement if only someone would lead. Interesting, did we overlook Noah Anjo? But let’s not kid ourselves. Tunisians successfully overthrew their government last week without needing any leader to guide them. Instead, regular people organized small circles of friends and relatives to create mass movement. Google to find out how they did it.

Our list of excuses for why we let this nonsense go on, goes on and on. Some people say it won’t do any good to protest. Others say the risks are too high, especially the way police brutality surfaces these days in PNG. Yet, people of Burma, Tunisia, Egypt, Indonesia, Philippines, the Chinese students of Tianamin square, all faced far greater fear and sense of hopelessness. Still they marched, sometimes to their deaths, in the hopes for better life. We mostly turn our heads. 

Since coming to power again in 2002, Michael Somare has presided over a legacy of increasing national corruption about which he’s been oddly quiet. Yes, we’ll march against corruption, so long as corrupt individuals aren’t mentioned directly and we demand nothing specifically. Somare learnt long ago that such weak protest can be safely ignored, with any petitions thrown in the rubbish.

He can’t let any of that block the door he opens wide to every overseas Tom, Dick and Harry eager to rip treasured resources from our land and seas, so that they can be used abroad to create finished products and fuel great factories, all of which ultimately will create far more economic development than we’ll ever have.

The government seems mostly concerned about whether THEIR pockets will be filled from the raw resources leaving our land. They could give a stuff about the customary resource owners. Many of us can see this clearly, yet what do we do in response? Write a letter to the newspaper, if that?

We're apparently blinded to this steady impoverishment of our nation and peoples by the few temporary jobs and fancy Moresby high rises that foreigners bring. Southern Highlanders dance in celebration of promised ‘development funds’ from the LNG project, seemingly oblivious that ExxonMobil typically earns a few billion times that in profits alone for just 3 months of that company’s operation.

We hold up the scraps that fall from Sukudunumi’s table as our excuse to not rise up against the very people who signed the unbalanced resource extraction deals, or used their positions of power to enrichen personal pocketbooks.

Why can’t we say enough is enough strongly enough to be listened to, if not feared, by those with their hands in our pockets? I ask this more of myself than others, because I’m part of this sea of apathy that makes up our PNG elite. Being relatively new to the internet, I can pretend that writing this op-ed piece is effective protest, but deep down I know that it’s just as ineffective as signing a petition. Usually I’m full of my own excuses. Rarely I speak the truth to myself.

The worst excuses people give to explain our ineffectiveness as citizens is that we’re not as smart or we’re lazier than people elsewhere. That might make sense except for one big fact: we weren’t always like this. Our forefathers were real fighters, but we’ve also shown our ability to apply traditional fight to modern needs. Perhaps our finest hour as a nation of concerned citizens came in 1997 after Julius Chan tried to bring in white Sandline mercenaries to slaughter Bougainvilleans until BCL’s Panguna mine could be re-opened.

The horror of that plan triggered thousands to march in the streets, and hundreds to gather around parliament and say ‘enough’ strongly enough that it scared Chan, Haiveta, and Ijape out of power. The story is often told about how a frightened Chan dressed in a police uniform and escaped parliament by hiding in the back of a police vehicle. Chan is out of the picture now.

Instead, we have a Grand Deceiver who steps down for a few weeks, then steps up again! How can he get away with this? Because we let him! Too few protest too ineffectively to put any pressure on the man. We’ve slid a long ways downhill since Chan.

What destroyed our will to fight sometime after 1997? Why we can’t stand up and force our government to start being accountable to we the people, as one would expect from any functioning democracy? We’re full of explanations that upon closer examination, seem mostly like lame excuses. It’s worth analyzing this further, since knowing what really causes our paralysis is the first step to finding a cure. I've been puzzling about this, trying to figure things out. Any ideas you can share?

* This article was first published on PNG Blogs