Realising and dealing with squatters

FOR hundreds of thousands of Papua New Guineans, urban centres are attractions as a means for improving their quality of life.
Whether this is true or not, that is always the underlying reason for the rural to urban drift.
Urban centres promise good jobs, incomes and all the material trappings of the modern cash society.
As they dream of all these factors in the village setting, they little realise the cost of living in an urban society – in finding shelter, food, clothing and raising a family.
Once they arrive and are trapped in the urban centre, they are pushed by necessity to make a life for themselves on the fringes – often in makeshift shelters – with little of the services that is available at planned residential areas. These, then, are our squatter settlers, and the places they reside in have come to be called squatter settlements.
There is a squatter settlement in every town and city in Papua New Guinea. It is populated, not by criminals but, by ordinary and, often, peace loving Papua New Guineans driven there by circumstances and the high cost of living in urban centres today.
Squatter settlements often develop without legal claims to the land or permission from the concerned authorities.
They are, therefore, considered illegal or have semi-legal status. As a result, infrastructure and services are poor or inadequate.
Over time, squatters have gathered in size and there are second or third generation children living there today who know no other place they can call home.
The squatter settlement is their home.
When these people are driven from the squatters by state-sanctioned force, when they are treated as criminals and their homes razed to the ground, what are these people to do?
In many instances, squatters flee one town to resettle in another town. One town’s problem-solving drive increases the other town’s squatter settlement problem.
In other instances, the harassed settlers shelter somewhere until things cool down, or the responsible authority has run out of money and, then, slowly filter back to their old settlements and rebuild.
This has been repeated time and again throughout PNG when provincial authorities have tried to get rid of squatters by way of chasing them off and trying to ship them back to their area of origin.
It must be understood that for many of these squatters, there is no home to return to. Relatives remaining in the rural homes of these squatters would normally have taken over their land and homes.
Madang Governor Sir Arnold Amet, freshly returned to his job by a Supreme Court edict, has made it his first public move to get rid of the squatter problem once and for all in his province.
Is he kidding? Has he not learnt any lesson from the actions of his immediate past predecessor?
Then governor James Yali drove squatters from Madang in droves. Homes were burnt to ashes, often with belongings in them.
Yali did so after giving fair warning. Those people who remained were rounded up. He sustained his action for months.
So, what has happened? Has this scorched earth policy got rid of squatters from Madang?
It has not. Indeed, they have been flocking to Madang in droves and the entire area of Madang town where settlements were burnt to the ground, there now stand new settlements. Others have sprung up around the Basamuk area, the site of the Ramu nickel mine township.
Will the new drive by Amet be successful? Time will tell.
It has not worked in other places where this has been tried before – Bougainville, Rabaul, Madang and Lae.
Indeed, there is a major one underway in Bulolo which has hit a snag because the authorities have run out of money.
Getting rid of squatters in this manner is destined for failure because squatters and squatter settlements are not a provincial government challenge. They are a national government challenge.
They do not beg heavy-handed police tactics. They require legal and policy shifts.
They do not require getting rid of. They require to be accommodated.