The Faceless Machine of Corporate Greed

The Spaida by Caleb Hamm

A poignant rendition of the story of today’s Papua New Guinea by Caleb Hamm. This extraordinary art by Caleb says a lot if you look into the details of this piece.

I’ll let Caleb himself say bits of it in words as posted on his FB page.

Haus Bilong Spaida

By Caleb Hamm

“We see the alienation of people that is the result of the present machine orientated economy.
We see true social security and the people’s happiness being diminished in the name of economic progress.
We caution therefore that large scale industries should only be pursued after careful and thorough consideration of the likely consequences upon the spiritual and social fabric of our people.
There is overwhelming evidence to suggest that a significant number of people who live by the fruits of multi million dollar multi-national corporations live in misery, loneliness and spiritual poverty.
We believe that since we are a rural people, our strength should be essentially in the land and in the use of our innate artistic talents.“
- Actual deliberations quoted from Papua New Guinea’s Constitutional Planning Committee in 1975. The year of Independence.

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Gargantuan proportions of Palm oil plantations fill PNG’s countryside where once stood one of the world’s last frontiers. Unsustainable monocultures now cover the logged hills and valleys. 24 % of PNG’s rainforest has been logged in the last 30 years and the hungry rate continues to threaten an irreplaceable and unique ecosystem.http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0222-png.html#The black river represents the massive Ok Tedi disaster where barrels of poisonous waste were spilled down the Fly River from the infamous Ok Tedi mine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ok_Tedi_environmental_disaster

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Illegal land grabs are not unknown to the rural people of PNG, but the recent Paga Hill incident topped them all. On Saturday, May 12, a historic district in PNG’s capital witnessed bulldozers pushing over 20 houses while police kept the home owners at bay. What was supposed to be a planned out eviction swiftly became a heartless and cruel demolition in this shady, allegedly illegal, urban land grab. I copied Paga Hill Estate’s proposed hotel building design which overshadows a bulldozer ploughing down a heap of cultural icons mixed with housing materials. Clearing a path for the limousine of modern colonialism.http://namorong.blogspot.ca/2012/05/smelly-beast-thats-paga-hill.html

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Ramu Nico, LNG PNG all represented by this web of oil pipelines and giant tank supplying the greedy spaida. Several rivers are currently dumping mine waste into the Bismark Sea and Huon Gulf. Yellow waters, dead fish and new bans on selling fish and produce in the market all affect those living in the area. How long do they have before there is no reef, no fish, or drinking water. Cyanide traces are now frequently being found in many rivers in PNG.

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More revelations of fraudulent land acquisition

Given below is an exact transcript of a report received late yesterday about more fraudulent acquisition of customary land from indigenous land owners through the lease lease-back scheme known as the Special Agriculture Business Lease (SABL).

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Outside the hausman at the meeting between the Bosmun & Taringe tribes Photo: Source Suplied

The people of the Bosmun and Taringe tribes in Bogia District of Madang Province want to know how the portion of Land from Taringe to Annaberg was taken by the government, and is now in the National Gazette.

All their Elders gathered at the ‘hausman’ in Bosmun and found that that total land area was leased for the so called ‘Special Agriculture Business Leases’ (SABLs)!

 

They say no one government official has visited them to discuss and get their consent as they are the Land OWNERS, and say THEY WOULD NEVER HAVE GIVEN AWAY THAT MUCH LAND AREA THAT COVERS 2 WHOLE VILLAGES!

 

They want immediate answers from the government and have petitioned their MP John Hickey and the Lands Department.

 

Hickey has signed their petition as of 5pm yesterday afternoon (18/04/2011), and has vowed to do all he can in his power on this starting today (19/04/2011).

This is getting out of hand simply because of somebody’s insatiable greed.

~ero~

Parliamentarians’ Ridiculous Pay Rise, High Infant Mortality and Cholera

By Scott Waide

 It was election year in 2002 when campaign efforts were at their peak.  I arrived at a school in the Tekin Valley in remote Oksapin in the Sandaun province after a 6 hour trek through the jungle.   

Grandma and child - Tekin 2002 © Scott Waide

The rain had just ended when I began an interview with a local teacher.    He was one of the few government representatives   in this   very isolated part of Papua New Guinea.  The only government aid post in his village had closed down a few years ago. The orderly left   for the provincial capital of Vanimo and never returned.   I wanted to know about infant and maternal mortality rates. At the time the teacher was the only person available who could give me a fair analysis of the situation.

Having come from Port Moresby where one relies on easily accessible and “reliable” statistics, I got straight into asking   a series of questions trying   to establish the number of mothers and children who had died in the last 12 months.   

“We really don’t know.” He said.  “We only know of those who died in   this village and the next.” 

He counted three infants and one mother who died in his village in that election month alone.  They all died of complications that could have been solved if they had easy access to a sub-health centre or even a medical orderly.   The nearest health centre was a day’s walk from where we were. It would take two days   to get there from the villages I passed.  But for pockets of small hamlets in the far off distance, getting to that health centre when a mother is experiencing   birth complications is an impossible dream.  The teacher couldn’t give me an exact number of children who died in the last 12 months or in the previous year.  But he gave me an educated guess. He said between 15 and 30 babies die every year in this mountainous region. 

“Too many,” he said shaking his head. “Too many.”

He went on to tell me   that people had come to accept the deaths of babies as part of their lives.  In the nearby villages, many families would gather for the death of a respected elder.   For a baby who died at birth, only the father and the mother would be at the burial. The teacher said in the small mountaintop villages, this was the scenario that was played out every month when a baby died:  The father would take the tiny body to the back of the hut and bury him or her there.  No one mourned for them.  They were “just” nameless babies who would not even be recorded as statistics because nobody knew.

In the same year, I found myself in another part of the Sandaun province at a small government-run aid post.   Half the concrete floor had collapsed into the ground. The medicine cabinet had only malarial tablets and liniment for body aches.  The medical orderly told me that a child had died about 24hours ago from dehydration.  By the time he had been brought to the aid post, the orderly could not administer treatment. The child’s father came at the aid post a few minutes later and was told by the orderly:  “If you want your son to live, take him and run to the health centre.”  The orderly said he got word in the afternoon that the   father did make it to health centre but the child had already died in his arms.

The situation may have already improved in those areas but in other places, it remains a reality that ordinary Papua New Guineans have to contend with.   What matters most to the ordinary person in the village are roads, bridges schools, good health services and most importantly, the ability to make money for him.   But it seems we keep getting it wrong every year!

In 2008, the Treasury department released figures in the Final Budget Outcome (FBO) which showed how much money was being wasted. The 68-page report outlined how the government more than doubled spending from K202.3 million to K478.5 million in deficit.  The expenses   included car purchases, a 12 million Kina Canberra residence, 100 thousand Kina for pipes and drums for the Correctional Service band and 65 thousand Kina for the Institute of Medical Research’s 40th anniversary celebrations.

In 2009, Members of Parliament paid themselves K10 million in accommodation and motor vehicle allowances.    One government backbencher said immediately after the decision that he would “give all the allowances back to parliament.”  In contrast, the Public Service Minister, Peter O’Neill said allowances which MPs were getting were “far below what was needed to meet the amounts charged by real estate companies.” 

The increases gladly received by MPs came at a time when the Port Moresby General Hospital and other hospitals around the country were   experiencing a dire shortage of drugs and medical supplies.   It was also a year when several hundred settlers were made homeless in Port Moresby after a police raid.  Also in that year, working class Papua New Guineans in towns and cities struggled with accommodation problems and high food costs.

As if all that wasn’t enough, members of Parliament have yet again voted this year to give themselves a 52 percent pay rise. On average each MP will get about 77 thousand Kina annually.  

All this is set against a gloomy backdrop   of high infantry mortality rates and new outbreaks of cholera in several parts of the country.

~ero~

Scott Waide is an award-winning television journalist from Papua New Guinea. He has a blog in which he shares poems and short stories on current issues facing PNG  at http://tingtingblokantri.blogspot.com/.
He also has a photo blog where he showcases Papua New Guinea through the lens of his camera at http://pngphotoblog.blogspot.com/.