The real Rural Papua New Guinea

Real Rural PNG. Photo source: Nick Laki

By Social Media admin & critic Nick Laki 

Just drove past this lad on a highway but had to stop to take a shot. Just by looking at him, it leaked my compassion:

• He is only 9 years old;

• He is carrying 5 coconuts stringed on a 2.5 kg crowbar. He had to cushion the weight with his shirt while his pants dropping;

• He traveled at least 3 kilometers to get those kulaus and brought back same distance which would have been half day walk just to sell them for K0.50 each. Essentially he worked for only K2.50 (US$0.70) for more than 6 hours. This is absolute poverty beyond doubt.

This is most certainly a representative case of the hardships faced by kids, youth, mothers, girls, boys and fathers in many rural areas of PNG where 80% of the population live. They are simply working so hard to get little money to buy simple things like soap, kerosene, cooking oil, and clothes to name a few. But other house hold wealth and assets are non-existed in their homes.

On the other hand, Papua New Guinea has been labelled as one of the most riches and coveted nations in the world with abundance of natural resources -Gold, Silver, Nickel, Cobalt, Diamond, Coffee, Copra, Cocoa, Timber, Tuna, Rubber, Palm Oil, Tea, Sugar, featured with the most exotic, breath-taking and beautiful landscape and environment ever found around the world - all buoyed and floated on the sea of Oil and Gas.

This nation with only 7 million people so rich in natural resources and yet its people are so poor –well below the poverty threshold measured by United Nations against other developing nations around the world.

Right now, only 5% of Papua New Guineans living in luxurious life; 10 % struggling to make ends meet in cities and towns (middle class citizen) while the rest 85% living in the rural where there is no electricity, proper water supply and sanitation system, rundown, hospitals or aid-posts, poor classrooms for children, no proper school materials and no receipt of basic governmental services such as roads, bridges, for so many years.

Government has been and is embarking year in, year out, to change the rural lifestyle but it has failed miserably. In fact, it has not able to stop the countless number of people migrating into cities and towns that influx the streets, and blocks that are the epicenter of synonymous ethnics fights , countless armed robberies, gang rapes, carjacking, cold-blood murdering and other relentless social turbulence? Meanwhile, ethnic tribal fights are now modernized into raging gun battles that run for days where many are killed–often unreported.

Rapes, murders, and other social crimes are appeared to be daily event while the authorities are being negligent or ignorant about the issues yet the citizens fall victims every year.

Schools are overcrowded with 70 – 100 children sitting on cold and dirty classroom floor listening to exhausted teachers. Every year, almost 70-80,000 School leavers are ejected from Papua New Guineas education system with only less that 5,000 finding meaningful employment, while the rest live to witness their dreams fading slowly.

Meanwhile the education system itself is a disaster with outdated curriculum and poor administration forcing teachers to leave for other vocations or even depart for positions in other sectors where the benefits are far more reasonable to live with.

Papua New Guinean hospitals are crammed with people seeking medical treatment while many dying on emergency floors, mothers literally bleeding from childbirth, and with severe wounds resulting from growing violent crime or ethnic clashes around the country.

Doctors are scarce and the Doctor-to-patient ratio is alarmingly well below UN recommended figures. In one province, the ratio is 1 Doctor for 30,000 people- Very appalling.

Health indicators paint a gloomy and depressive picture, the spectra of Death is very visible-gliding over vulnerable, very young, expectant mothers and the elderly, picking at what seems to be will and whim to take. How about those live in the rural areas that are inaccessible by road? Well, if they get sick, they die. It’s that

simple.

The nation is reeling from AIDS, TB and malnutrition while the population growth is the highest in the region at 2% and one of the highest in the world and there seems to be no effort to check its

growth.

The point is ‘WHEN’ will this lifestyle change? Will the historic K15Billion national budget in 2014 ever going to change it or are we going to continue to suffer till these kids grow old and die without even experience changes as those seen in Australia , Singapore and

other countries?

Ironically, we are forever fed with sweet talks from PMs, MPs, bureaucrats, cronies and political soothsayers about a change coming tomorrow but it lapses from next day, to next week, to next month, to next year and next election and nothing happening, maybe till their

kingdom come.

Is my post promoting cargo cult mentality or handout syndrome that has been systemic in the country? Hell No. I am talking about the money from Gold, copper, silver, oil and gas exploited in the country unlike other countries that being given to major corporate companies with under-the-table deals through synonymous tax holidays whereas every sale of commodities are being EXPORT DUTY EXEMPTED. Government knows that people are suffering from getting basic services yet the earnings from the resources are squandered making few millionaires (warlords) overnight at expense of rural people’s ignorance and/or lack of knowledge. We are simply 7million people (little less than 7.3million people live in New York City) with limited landscapes and geographical constraints but our earning could have superseded all ordeals and propelled our progress to comparative level in the Asia pacific.

This case is overwhelmingly sympathetic and grieving in a 21st century where development in this land is taking one step forward and 2steps backwards though there is sufficient assistance available to anyone in a globalized planet to accelerate development and improve lifestyle.

Oh Papua New Guinea... you are so beautiful and so rich but maybe you have inhabited some of the most hostile and barbaric human beings. If PNG country was a village court magistrate, he would sanction all locals for imprisonment and preserve the foreigners on the land.

Oh God, let me take a break now and sip a champagne wishing PNG well in 2014.

Merry Christmas!!!