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The core issues
MINJ is the site of the latest
outrage. The heart of the town school, with more than 500 enrolled
students, has been torched by arsonists, who broke into the
building in their determination to burn it to the ground.
The administrative core of the school cost more than K150,000 to
build, and school equipment and property valued at nearly K30,000
was lost in the fire.
There is no immediately credible reason.
It is another perfect example of the national decay of our
communities.
Actions like these are planned. They are rarely a secret within
the village of those involved.
Our nation is today suffering from self-inflicted wounds. We have
failed to harness the potential of our youth while continuing to
populate our country at an ever-increasing rate.
We now have a significant group of Papua New Guineans who received
little or no education.
Their anger is tangible.
They lead purposeless lives, mere day to day existence defined by
anger and bitterness.
Destruction is the only act that can give a brief moment of power
and the twisted satisfaction that comes from destroying facilities
or property intended for other more fortunate citizens.
It is important that we recognise our own responsibilities in this
matter.
It’s not enough to verbally attack these people, bemoan their
actions and wonder aloud whatever has happened to the rest of the
world.
The National is in no way defending the actions of this sector of
our society.
But we all must share the responsibility for its existence and in
more recent times, its growth.
Too many of our youngsters never have the chance of an education.
Too many of their elder brothers have had little opportunity to
convert their very basic education into jobs that could bring a
degree of satisfaction.
And now, because this process has been going on for a long time,
we have an even older generation of fathers and uncles also devoid
of any formal education – people who are often confined to either
villages or urban squatter settlements that convert their
unfocused energies into crime.
At this point, democracy, the philosophy that is based on equality
of opportunity and of access to education, becomes almost
farcical.
What we are now in danger of perpetuating is an elitist society in
which equality is a theory to be bandied about between groups
within that elite sector.
Outside of that elite strand, the term democracy becomes ever more
meaningless.
That in turn leads to the increasing isolation of the bulk of the
population.
Both the isolation and the population that experience its
devastation grow in tandem.
The result is a large number of disaffected people scattered
throughout both our rural and urban areas for whom “success” is
measured in ever more outrageous compensation claims.
It is a rapidly growing number of people who seek to generate easy
money through drug growing and production and the gun-smuggling
that is an economic and political adjunct of that process.
The burning down of a school building provides a fleeting
satisfaction to these people.
It is a momentary demonstration of their “power” and their
capacity to wound a society they see as entirely antagonistic.
And it is a classic demonstration of the “have” and “have-not”
mentality that is now apparent throughout our country.
Readers know full well that the arson at Minj is no isolated
incident.
Countless schools, aid posts and clinics, airfields, bridges and
roads and a host of other government installations have met
similar fates over the past 30 years.
Our leaders have rarely attempted to go to the people, sit with
them and slowly and painstakingly determine what they want.
Too often, our leaders understand their role solely as the
application of their solutions to the problems of their
constituents. What those constituents actually want, in other
words the aspirations of the people, remains hidden and invisible.
The Minj school incident is a perfect embodiment of a society that
has lost its way and of people who no longer know in what
direction that way lies.
Enough of leaders whose empty promises echo across the land.
Give us men and women who will listen and learn from the people
before they act.
 
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