Letters & Opinions

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Saturday, January 23, 2010

LNG - just another big bang product

EVERYONE is talking non-stop about the great benefits of the LNG project and what blessings it will bestow upon the poor people of PNG.  Yeah, big deal all right. As usual it's all big talk from the government.  As usual there will not be any real sustainable 'trickle-down' effect for the grassroots and the poor resource owners. 
Apart from the little benefits to the resource owners and ordinary Papua New Guineans, and as has happened many times before - everyone in the food chain: local, provincial, national governments and their corrupt cronies, a dysfunctional public service, foreign investors, carpetbaggers and many special interests will get a piece of the action (or fingers in the cookie jar) for the ordinary people to benefit from their plundered resources.

This will further increase the future prospects of grand political corruption levels in PNG.  We will continuously see more local member's pork-barreling pet projects sprouting up all over the country.  The greedy 'pollies' will continue to fill their pockets.  More wanton plundering of the people's resources by those they mandate to lead and govern this country.

Today's PNG MP has unfortunately and unashamedly become a greedy despot.  He has self appointed himself to become his people's very own bank manager, funds loans officer, multi-project manager and general carpetbagger in his local domain.  He will give out cash and other goods 'willy-nilly' and won't invest the time needed to be fully committed to making good laws in parliament to protect his country's natural resources.

Until some very senior MPs are jailed behind bars than maybe, a very big maybe; that PNG political corruption levels may abate a little as the message sinks in.  The politicians and other unscrupulous people selling the country's resources off to foreign, and other special interests must be legally convicted.  The Melanesian culture of being publicly shamed by being locked away in the 'kallabus' for a very long time might do the trick.

While the LNG looks a big bang product every man and his dog is really going at it in a feeding frenzy.  The nation is being inundated daily with mass media information overload of what a great blessing this LNG is to PNG and its people that the prime minister and his government has ignored are the real basics to fix the daily survival needs of our poor villager languishing in rural PNG.

The poor rural villager is now very much caught up in this all confusing euphoria through much media hype.  The people do not really understand just what hell is all this excitement being generated about by certain politicians, and made worse by the constant BS preaching of the CEO PNG Inc.

The fact is that the people will suffer more from the many negative effects of this mad rush to fast track the LNG project.  This is being done at the people's expense as the real problems of PNG are not being addressed at all by the prime minister and his government.

Many people are so fed up by now that they now looking forward to 2012 and want to see the crooks thrown out of the 'haus tambaran" by the real people of PNG. 

Reginald Renagi
Port Moresby

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