by
Brian Gomez
Recent polls underline
wisdom of rural voters
A couple of weeks ago, as election
results came in, the National Broadcasting Commission ran
nightly talkback and commentary sessions. One somewhat
distressed caller was questioning the likely impending victory
of National Alliance.
The caller was complaining that NA had been leading a corrupt
government and it was somehow not fair that people in rural
areas were going to vote it back into office.
In a previous column, I had discussed the corruption issue. At
heart corruption is an issue that would not be resolved in a
short period of time, being almost a generational issue.
Nevertheless there are many indicators to suggest corruption
levels between 2002 and 2007 had been greatly reduced in the
years prior to this and going back for some considerable period.
One clear indication has been the huge amounts of funds
regularly ripped off State-owned enterprises over many, many
years, resulting in significant losses and frequent government
bailouts.
Prior to 2002, State utilities such as Telikom PNG and PNG Power
were in a financial mess. They even had trouble borrowing money
on commercial terms.
When the former government wanted to privatise Telikom, the sale
of this asset was going to fetch far less than Digicel’s
investments here.
Telikom and PNG Power, which had not hired local graduates for
many years, now have robust recruitment and development plans
that will revolutionise these sectors in the next decade. The
trouble is most Papua New Guineans, who have been starved of
valuable services for more than a decade, want these services
put in place virtually overnight, which is impossible.
The only reason Telikom is now able to put up a considerable
fight to the challenge presented by Digicel is because it is a
more robust organisation than it has been for the past two
decades or more. It is likely that had Telikom been privatised
earlier, most people would now be enjoying better
telecommunications services.
During the 2002-07 period, the government went to court to
cancel and discredit numerous false claims made against the
government over many years, many of these involving highly
corrupt deals involving government insiders.
Interestingly the NBC panel members fielding this call were not
willing to discuss the substance of the complaints about
corruption, leaving most listeners to conclude they were in
agreement with this view. Besides the points I have raised, it
is also clear legislative changes in recent years have increased
government transparency, along with improved public sector
financial management, a process actively aided by the Asian
Development Bank.
At the heart of the corruption problem is the wantok system,
which is a very valuable support system for many communities.
But the pressures they place on politicians and bureaucrats can
be close to unbearable, as many people would recognise.
The caller’s other comment about rural people voting in an
NA-led government rather than informed urban dwellers just had
me shaking my head in dismay. Detailed statistics have yet to be
analysed but I am sure NA had won huge numbers of votes in urban
areas even though it did not win any seat in Port Moresby.
Indeed it is possible it won more urban votes than any other
political party.
But why should it be surprising that any political party would
have to base its electoral fortunes on rural votes and seats?
After all 85% of the people live in rural areas and have to
exercise their democratic rights.
There is an underlying suggestion in some commentaries, and as
openly alluded to by the NBC caller, that somehow because many
rural people are illiterate, they are poorly informed and their
votes are “inferior” to the votes of their urban cousins.
This is, of course, fanciful nonsense that many urban elite like
to propound because, in the end, rural people are just as
capable of making good value judgments about whether or not a
particular political party or government has delivered results
or deserves another term.
It was the blood, sweat and tears of hundreds and possible
thousands of poor and often illiterate rural subsistence farmers
that has resulted in many Papua New Guineans making great
strides in education and becoming scientists, engineers, pilots,
academics and taking on a host of other professions.
Even though many of these farmers may not have spent a single
day in school, in their wisdom they made sure some of their
children managed to get the best education possible. People who
look down on rural dwellers and others, I believe, have a
greatly flawed education and are incapable of being genuine
leaders.
It reminds me of the words of a well-known Australian
anthropologist, an expert on the Philippines. He could go into a
rice field; take a look at the paddy stalk and tell you what
problems the farmer was having – was there inadequate
nitrogenous fertiliser or inadequate irrigation, etc.
This very smart individual, whom I certainly could not match in
a lifetime of study, had this gem of advice about the illiterate
farmers he sometimes worked with: If his “expert”
recommendations were rejected it was always clear he had got his
analysis wrong because the “simple” farmer knew better. He had
to go back to the drawing board to understand why he was wrong.
The truth of these wise words hit home on one occasion here in
PNG. I am sure anthropologists and other experts would have many
more examples.
Many readers of this newspaper would remember the vanilla boom a
few years ago when the economy was virtually in a state of
depression. Farmers in various parts of the country, from East
Sepik to some island communities, had taken to growing vanilla
long before the Papua New Guinean experts had been aware, or
made public, their realisation that vanilla prices had literally
gone through the roof.
Farmers who may never have read a newspaper, even if they were
literate, somehow were able to know that world prices had
reached phenomenal levels. This followed several bad crops from
the world’s biggest producing nation, Madagascar.
Please give our rural folk a break. Successive governments have
possibly failed them badly because of the warped thinking of
many so-called elite intellectuals and do-gooders from urban
areas!
