Voting without fear or favour

WITHOUT fear or favour is one of several catchphrases Papua New Guineans love.
Everyone bandies it about. How often in recent times have we heard that people must be able to vote without fear or favour in order to have a “free and fair election”.
Okay, there may be a need to repeatedly drum that message at people because of the history of elections, and the violence that has often accompanied them.
But why is the message always seemingly directed at people who live in urban or peri-urban areas?
Urbanites make up, at best, 15% of our six million-odd population.
Surely, the message will have far greater impact if it is directed at, and understood by, the rural population, that 85% of the people who seem to live at the whim of others.
Could it be that after almost four decades of independence so little has changed in the lives of rural people that they just do not give a hoot about what happens in the corridors of power at Waigani or in the provincial capitals?
That they have far more basic worries – where to get enough food and safe, clean drinking water, for starters. Forget medical care or education.
It does not say much about national development plans before and since independence. How long will our geography be used as a crutch for the siphoning off of millions of kina.
Without fear or favour, how much more nobler can you get? But do we really believe or understand what that means?
Why, then, don’t the people, who can make a difference, speak up without fear or favour?
The educated, or elites, as they are called, have, by and large, ducked for cover since Aug 2 and burrowed even deeper into the shadows since Dec 12 last year.
The silence from the Papua New Guinea Law Society, for one, is deafening.
Is it because its members are too busy raking in tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of kina from the litigation the political impasse has and is generating?
It should have been the first to say where it stands on whether the Constitution or Parliament is supreme.
What is its stance on its members who are making a mint on both sides of the political divide?
Will it take action against lawyers who are propagating what the Supreme Court has already ruled as illegal?
What about the accountants, engineers, geologists, miners, all the elites who cashing in the resources boom, should not they speak up? They who have so much more to lose if, as we alluded to yesterday, the fuse were lit by our inaction and this country erupted in bloody violence.
Even more alarmingly, what about our national watchdog, the Ombudsman’s Commission? In truth it should have instigated the Supreme Court reference and not the East Sepik provincial government. Why is it keeping quiet?
Business as usual is not the answer. The only way out of the political strife is for people to speak up, without fear or favour.
For Papua New Guinea, like most of Melanesia, it will be far more beneficial to resoundingly break our culture of silence, to mentally emancipate ourselves from mental slavery, as Rastafarian prophet Bob Marley sang.
Silence is acceptance. How long will ordinary Papua New Guineans sit and accept their elected leaders bending the laws to suit themselves?
When will people have the courage of conviction to tell their wantoks they are wrong, if and when they are wrong?
As diverse as the country is, it will only be “one people” when everyone, regardless of who they are, can have their say, without fear or favour.
Now, in the middle of the politicking comes an equally great concern – selective justice.
The Supreme Court has made a ruling and it is only logical that the judiciary will take its cue from that august body.
Does that mean it is waste of time and resources by the O’Neill faction in prosecuting and sacking all those who do not toe the line?
No one disagrees that an urgent solution must be found. An early election is not the answer. If anything, an early election could be the spark that starts the conflagration.
O’Neill may be the flavour of the month but it is obvious that, after the general election, he could possibly face the same kind of treatment that is being dished out to Grand Chief Sir Michael Somare in his name by the very people who are today propping him up.