The steel axe of the 21st century
By TONY POWER
 COMPUTERS are the steel axe of the 21st century. I would like the so-called “elites” of Papua New Guinea, including bureaucrats, politicians and those in the private sector, to take some time to contemplate this statement.
I would like to demonstrate that the present way of planning for this country is upside down. I would like to generate some upside down creative thinking to rectify the situation in order to harness the enormous power of the people who own the country – the village people.
We can do it by designing digital tools for the masses and stop pretending that only the elite can use them. Remember, digital tools are both hardware and software that can be as simple as designing a form and as complicated as the guidance system to send a missile to hit an asteroid.
In the 19th century, traders, missionaries and colonial officers introduced the steel axe into the land later to become PNG. Axes were traded very rapidly to very remote parts of the country, often decades before the proud owners ever saw a foreigner.
The steel axe helped our village people to do what they were good at, in their own backyard – farming, house building and if the truth be known, possibly fighting.
Digital technology is the steel axe of the 21st century. A huge emphasis on digital technology applications at the village level has the power to help transform rural villages into productive, attractive locations for residents who will no longer feel constrained to flock to the main towns to keep in touch with the world round them.
A recent World Bank study stated that the trend towards urbanisation is going on at a great pace worldwide despite all the problems that unplanned urban settlement creates.
In PNG, the same trend is evident in many towns, resulting in development of unplanned settlements with all the associated problems of poor health, unemployment, crime and ethnic tensions often related to land grabbing.
Over the last 30 years, using stone axe technology, our governments have made efforts to improve the situation by regularising urban settlements providing utilities, access roads and power supplies and eventually security of tenure for the settlers, only to be rewarded by an increased influx of village people. All government efforts up to now have concentrated on the wrong location. They have tried to solve the problem at the end point of the problem and ignored the source.
The steel axe of the 21st century can trim the very roots of the problem and slow down the growth of unplanned urban settlement. Village people will no longer feel constrained to go to the bright lights but will become temporary urban tourists, anxious after their visit to get back home to their undoubtedly better, healthier and more interesting village environment.
How can this digital axe provide village people with tools to do a lot of work for the nation that so far is conceived upside down and is therefore expensive, inefficient or just does not happen?
The ideal situation, where all villages have telecentres or are linked to telecentres, will take some time. A telecentre is a public place where people can access computers, the internet, and other digital technologies that enable them to gather information, create, learn and communicate with others while they develop essential 21st century digital skills. What can and must be done now is for policymakers to think digitally, with the explicit aim of harnessing the energy of village people in development. Village people live in a controlled environment based on their land holdings as anyone will find out on crossing those borders.
In other words, the village people between them have a government system covering 97% of the country. The introduced government system of the modern State of Papua New Guinea is a gloss on the original system.
In order to gather the data for running a modern state, government officials periodically descend like birds of prey onto the villages to pick the brains of the village people. Why?
The village people constitute an ongoing living national database self maintained at no cost to the State. Digital systems need to be designed for the entire nation that can be implemented by the village people.
Every five to 10 years, we spend hundreds of millions of kina to conduct a census whereby the data grabbers descend to the remotest areas. Even if sometimes the final nexus ends up with a guesstimate, the data is gathered up in pelican bills and wallaby pouches and fed into computers for the bureaucrats to chew over for the next 10 years.
Okay, this is a digital exercise but only from the top down. It does not involve village people and the information does not reach village people.
Every five years, we repopulate the Parliament. In order to do this, we spend hundreds of millions to generate a new Common Roll that seems to satisfy no one as regards completeness and integrity and timeliness.
Citizens are scrambling to establish an identity in the modern economy. Most in employment get one from an employer.
Others, mostly children of townspeople, are being registered at birth and a few get their own passports. The majority, mostly rural citizens, are left out in the far queue.
When they come into a bank with a wad of hard earned cash from commodity sales, and say they are Joe Blow from such and such a clan in such and such a village, they are met with a blank bank stare. They are told to scurry round to find a range of identified people who can say that they are who they say they are.
The demand for land registration is evident everywhere. Land registration is the most critical issue facing development of PNG today. All the information required to register land is held in the living database in the villages, not in Waigani.
Digital systems can be designed to provide the tools for the village people to capture and maintain all the data necessary to accomplish the good governance tasks enumerated above. The decentralised, living database is converted into a digital database available to all.
For example, a national system for generation of unique identification numbers for land, citizens, incorporated land groups, etc. It can be generated in a manner that can be implemented and kept up to date, at little or no cost to the State, simply at the village level.
Once the central government can get cooperation between the census, the Electoral Commission and community development, this system will generate a unique village number such as 1623176.
All the abovementioned bureaucracies can use this number and what follows instead of regularly wasting hundreds of millions of kina imperfectly doing their own thing.
Now we come to the interface between big government and the people. Armed with their unique village number, and with a minimum of training, the village leaders are able to accomplish a variety of tasks.
Calling on their expertise and control of their living database they can assign numbers to their clans. Added to their village number, when registered, these numbers will give a unique number to an incorporated land group.
In the same way, listing and numbering the properties owned by the clan provides unique parcel identification for clan lands. Each village usually has less than 100 clans per village and each is given a two-digit number.
A particular land parcel can be identified by joining the village number with the clan number and another two-digit number for the parcel, for eg 1623176-01-07. Computerized, this becomes a bar code like the ones used in supermarket checkouts.
In a people list, recording the families and individuals in each clan adds a couple of more numbers to the village number to unique personal identification numbers suitable for issue of birth certificates, ID cards, and passports when required. This system is not “big brother” as the data is generated, controlled and maintained by the users in the village.
Papua New Guineans change their names and spelling all the time but once given a number, a computer can track the changes with ease.
In order for village people to become more actively involved in the use of digital tools for their own development, they need to develop some new skills and be equipped with digital machines and possess electricity to power them up.
I have employed many Grade 10 dropouts from Samberigi and Kutubu and placed them in front of computers after a brief introduction. In the space of a month or two, after spending hours of their free time mostly teaching themselves, they were very capable of using the elementary programs such as Word and Excel.
Rural electrification by centrally-generated wire-distributed electricity will be a distant dream for years to come. At the moment, villages in the shadow of distribution systems are still in the dark.
Solar technology is highly developed worldwide and is becoming more so day by day, as the overdeveloped producers of greenhouse gasses are scrambling to find alternatives to coal and petroleum. A telecentre, powered by solar power, provides access by satellite to available forms of digital communication including the internet and television and school lessons.
Along with internet, e-commerce applications will empower villagers with many economic opportunities organised from their very own village.
Applications for education are obvious. Village people can access the worldwide web for information previously only available to university students and even then only on a limited scale.
Present efforts by the universities and government offices to link up their access to the internet are commendable but just a drop in the bucket when the population as a whole is considered.
This is the usual top-down approach or upside down thinking that only skims the surface of the power of digital technology. The first dim rays of light of the dawn of the digital age have already begun to filter down to the villages.
When we have complete coverage of the country by cellphone systems that actually work, that alone will begin the process of modernising villages. Indeed technological developments of mobile telecommunications systems may make the possibility of telecentres much cheaper or not even needed at all. Broadcast TV is slowly reaching some of our small towns and nearby villages.
How can village people afford the technology?
The hundreds of millions savings by developing the census, common roll and citizen registration as demonstrated above would be a great help.
New Guinea has been cleaning the planet’s lungs free of charge for millennia. It is time to get some rent from the polluters and pump that money into the rural villages to provide solar power to energise a range of electronic and digital applications that will give village people the tools so that they can transform their quality of life and engage themselves actively in creating employment and managing their own development.
PNG needs to have a special division in the Ministry of Communication wholly devoted to mastering the available solar power and digital technologies to deploy the applications to our villages in an affordable manner. Villages that have enough population to support a primary school along with their elementary school catchment probably have enough population to afford to build a telecentre, a communication centre to provide a window to the world, transforming our villages into genuine global villages.
Clearly this will not happen overnight. My point is that there must be a very deliberate government policy to aim for introduction of village telecentres over the next decade or PNG will miss out on one of the greatest opportunities for development ever offered from modern technology. We must start now.

Note: The writer was a former lecturer at the University of PNG and consultant to the Office of Village Development and Kutubu Petroleum Development Project. He has authored more than 20 publications and is currently doing research on the Melanesian land tenure and social organisation in relation to resource mobilisation fore sustainable development.
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