Lae Open seat up for grabs

The National Letters

MOROBE has the largest in landmass and population.
It is one of Papua New Guinea’s economic basket.
Its capital, Lae, is shrouded by its facelift of infrastructure and rapid development.
Lae has been dominated by the Morobe people of Ahi origin in the last two decades.
They were supported by the people of Morobe in other eight districts of the province during the national general elections.
This spirit of “Morobeans for Morobeans” has mastered Ahi’s course for last the two decades until the seat was taken over by one of Morobe and Lae’s true son, who was a non-Ahi from Markham, Lae MP and Lands and Physical Planning Minister John Rosso.
There are many pressing issues that have influenced the shifting of political powers from the Ahis to another Morobean during the last national general elections.
I strongly believed it’s the dawn of the declination of the culturally centric whim of “Morobeans for Morobeans”.
All Morobeans who reside in Lae, including people from other provinces, respect the Ahi people and have supported them through voting for them as political leaders up till the 2017 national general elections.
This tradition of Morobeans for Morobeans in the Lae open electorate seat has disintegrated with the majority of Morobeans shifting their trust to a non-Ahi.
They assumed that he would change the course of their never-ending socio-economic problems.
Here are some of the problems:

  •  ETHNIC clashes – Morobeans from other eight districts have fought with people from other ethnicities in Lae with the anticipation of receiving favourable responses from the Lae MP. But that has never happened;
  •  LAND titles – politicians use promises of land titles to deceive people from other ethnicities who have settled in Lae during the 60s, 70s and 80s to get their votes. Ahi politicians have failed to address this problem, which contributed towards their downfall in political representation; and,
  •  YOUTHS – one of the leading social economic problem that challenges policy makers and the Morobe government at this time is socio-economic problems associated with youths.
    About 70 per cent of youths in Lae are from Morobe.
    The remaining 30 per cent are from other provinces who were born in Lae.
    Most of these youths are school leavers while others are not properly educated.
    Some have dropped out of school.
    For the last 20 years, nothing was done to ensure youths realised their potentials.
    That is not right as youths make up almost more than half of the population in Lae.
    These issues have already changed the perspectives of the Morobe people in terms of supporting each other.
    The disintegration of this so-called “Morobeans for Morobeans” tradition of political power support resulted in the election of Rosso.
    But now the momentum has intensified to a level where the constituencies of Lae have had enough of mere rhetorics and political propaganda of “Morobeans for Morobeans” politics.
    With the current growing wave of changing perspectives, the possibility of Morobeans retaining the Lae open electorate seat is far from happening, given that Rosso has failed to address these mentioned and other issues.
    It won’t be surprising if the next Lae MP is someone not from Morobe but has been in Lae all of his/her life.

Namox Paul,
Cydern B