The following article, written by young Madang-based businessman Allan Bird, appeared in the letters page of The National newspaper on Tuesday, December 30, 2008, and reflects on the various problems affecting
By ALLAN BIRD
LAST month, I was privileged to speak at a business and Government leaders summit at the
I wondered what it was that kept Sir George here when many of our well-off nationals, including politicians, were buying homes in
A man of few words; his great deeds and achievements will outlive him.
Will our Government ever deal with the root cause of this problem?
Are we going to forget this after we laid this great man to rest?
After all, this is what we do in PNG, isn’t it?
We all have very short memories: we are masters of the art of knee-jerk reactions.
Sadly, many lawyers are already rubbing their hands with glee, knowing full well the cash cow is waiting to be milked at Tete now that our well meaning, hard working police officers have razed it.
I sympathise with the police commissioner and his men whose job was to remove a viper’s nest.
To begin with, our laws were written to protect criminals, not the innocent.
Criminals know this; that is why they are emboldened and, to some extent, empowered to do what they do. There is no doubt most settlements are the perfect breeding ground for criminals.
I know as I grew up in a settlement 30 years ago. It was only through divine intervention that I did not choose a life of crime like the many friends I grew up with.
Illegal settlements full of young men with little or no education, no skills and little chance of getting a job are going to turn on the rest of us eventually unless we do something about their situation.
Razing the settlements will only move the criminals to another location.
In addition, the police action has given those animals one more reason to make our lives more terrifying; we have destroyed their homes and put their families on the streets.
Quite simply, they will be back to kill some other poor soul in the same manner in some other location.
Today, it was Tete. Tomorrow it could be Morata, Nuigo, Sisiak, Bumbu or Papua compound.
There are many more places with young men who have no jobs, no life, no hope and no future.
To them their life has little value, so why should your life or that of our loved ones be worth anything?
They have nothing to lose while we have everything to lose.
It is my hope that what happened to Sir George will end there but I am not confident because, in this country, we have a poor record of solving problems.
For starters, we need to plan resettlement areas for people in settlements. Such areas need to be properly zoned, have services like schools, health centres and so on.
These places need to be located in areas where the population density is low. These people need to be engaged productively so that they can pay for the land they have been given over a period of time.
This will give them meaning and a chance at a future, better than no future at all.
We need to make drastic changes to our education system. We have to decide how to train our young people. Should we train all of them for a life in urban areas or rural areas? For as long as I can remember, we have been training people for life in towns. But we have not been able to generate employment opportunities.
When that fails, we try to solve the problem by relocating our half-educated, non-skilled young citizens to the villages and expect them to become farmers.
They have no rural skills, having just spent eight to 10 years in a classroom. They don’t know the meaning of hard work, sweat and toil and we expect them to become farmers?
We need to change the way we educate our children and be more honest about their chances of getting jobs in towns and cities.
We should take a hard look at how we distribute wealth in this country.
Since independence, we continue to spend 80% of PNG’s wealth in the National Capital District and, to a lesser extent, Lae city. I am not aware of plans to change this anytime soon.
How are we to provide opportunities for our people, direct them away from crime and make them useful citizens when we lack the will to move a fair share of the nation’s wealth outside NCD and Lae?
I have not seen coffee or cocoa plantation, a mine or even an oil well anywhere in NCD, yet the best part of the PNG cake is consumed there.
How do our policy makers expect to make even the tiniest amount of difference in this country when they lack the courage to move sufficient resources elsewhere?
We have 20 provinces in this country, not two.
The riches of Bougainville, Ok Tedi, Misima, Porgera, Lihir and Kutubu are miles from NCD. This situation needs to change.
We need to toughen our laws so that murderers and rapists are summarily put to death.
Just because other nations say it does not work is a lame excuse not to exercise this punishment here.
My people used to put murderers and rapists to death in the past; it was part of our culture and we accepted it.
Such crimes were unheard of in the past but now they are common.
We are not Europeans. We are Melanesians; we should act like one and hold onto those facets of our culture that served us well in the past.
Even the least educated of our people understand this.
Lastly, the leaders of this land need to lead by example.
How can we expect our people to live life away from crime when our leaders live lives that leave little to the imagination?
Every nation on Earth succeeds or fails as a direct result of leadership or lack thereof.
It is ironical that Sir George, a man who strived to create work for so many less fortunate, it was those very people he tried to provide opportunities for who took his life.
The nation owes him a great debt. PNG is now a poorer nation because one of our giants was cruelly taken from us.
Allan Bird
Madang
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