Why should the rest of PNG pay for Hela’s behaviour?

HELA, the province that is synonymous with liquefied natural gas, is steadily drowning in its sea of oil and gas.
Cabinet’s decision last week for a call-up of security forces to quell the rising law and order problems in Hela is just a band aid treatment for a serious ailment.
All it achieves is depriving the rest of PNGs rural population of K11 million that could have helped relieve them of some of their hardships and improve poor government services.
Why should the other cash-strapped yet peace-loving provinces have to pay for some peoples’ stone-age barbaric mentality and their obvious hell-bent campaign to exterminate all petty opposing threats, reduce the number of beneficiaries or give supreme control to a few?
Moreover, these people show no respect whatsoever for the law and police.
The other regions are fed up of seeing expensive extravagant so called peace truces, reconciliation ceremonies and compensations all of which seemed to have been put only for public show with no lasting effect as they seemed to be repeated according to their tribal warfare calendar.
The amassing and wanton use of guns in Hela and the other Highlands provinces had been an open secret for years.
Yet, the concerned leaders have only half-heartedly  addressed it and now expect the rest of the country to pay for the havoc caused.
If Hela’s gas reserves can rival the small Arab states’ oil reserves then perhaps they would be better off on their own.
PNG would rather be peaceful and prosperous than be embroiled in perennial ethnic wars and risk being reduced to a state of anarchy and abject poverty despite its wealth of natural resources.
Let Hela go, it has the resources to make it alone – it won’t make PNG go broke.

BT Laskona, Via email