Why blame the churches?

IT was nice to see Prime Minister Peter O’Neill meeting leaders at the Evangelical Lutheran Church Synod, as shown in the photo on The National’s front page on Tuesday, Jan 9.
However, the last line of the caption had me once again noting how silly our politicians can be in making speeches.
Do they have speech writers or experts who can check what they are thinking of saying, before they say what they are thinking?
The last line in the actual caption reads: “The prime minister said the church should take the lead to address those issues (sorcery accusations, gender violence and violence against women) in rural PNG.”
Frankly, I cannot believe what I was reading.
More of that speech was reported on page 3 of the paper under the article titled “O’Neill wants churches to lead sorcery fight”.
The thing I do not understand is why is O’Neill passing the responsibility of the fight to the churches?
The churches are doing a lot of work but they can only do so much – they do not have the teeth to win the fight against sorcery-related attacks or issues, as well as violence of all sorts.
They do not have the money, and they do not have the means to penalise people who abuse the rights of others.
That is where the government and its departments and state agencies should be coming on board.
They should use full force to eliminate such crimes with the use of good and updated laws and penalties aimed at deterring such evil acts. The questions I had in mind was: Has the government and its departments (Police, Justice and Community Development) and its agencies actually got into
the fight against sorcery-related attacks and issues and gender violence?
As far as I am concerned, the government has no real overarching plan to tackle this issue of sorcery-related attacks and gender violence, among others.
The fight is the government’s – not the churches’ – because the government has the money and teeth, as in prosecution of and penalising those guilty of participating in any violent crime.
I read a few weeks ago too that the Department of Community Development was happy with tens of millions of kina that the government had allocated to it.
I made a point to friends that if there is no overarching plan by the government to fight violence such as sorcery-related attacks and gender-based, as well as getting departments like Community Development involved, we will continue to read news of such attacks time and again.
Such stories will continue to be front-page stories in our daily papers.
I have noticed too that the attacks are now more common in Port Moresby.
It is time that NCD Governor Powes Parkop, a lawyer, should head the fight against such attacks.
He should woo MPs in Parliament to take a fresher and more-determined look to come up with legislation and plans to tackle these issues before they threaten more lives.
See the logic, please: If such violence are occurring in the capital city of PNG and are not addressed competently, how will the other 21 provinces fare in the fight against this PNG sin that is attracting international attention?
If the Government is not serious in addressing these issues, the sin will continue. Thank you.

PNG Tauna