Being Realistic: Successful protests come from effective educating and organising, not hoping and praying!
Over the last few months, there have been at least 2 protest gatherings advertised on the internet where hardly anyone came.
It is unclear who announced these marches or what organising they did behind the scenes. But the damage is done and the O’Neill government is now confident that the anticorruption movement is weak, disorganised and of no threat. The public that supports the anticorruption protest movement were demoralised by the protests that never materialised.
Those involved in coming up with these ghost protests placed too much false hope and made too little organisational effort to make the protests successful. They seemed to think that advertising alone would bring out participants. This is yet another example of the lazy, short-cutting, excessively optimistic, blind chance taking, triam tasol without any planning kind of attitude that has held our country back time and time again.
“Hope without strategic planning is meaningless, strategic planning without action is futile, and action without strategic planning is fatal.”
Nowhere outside PNG have public protests succeeded on hope. The key to success is extensive planning that relies on research, not faith. It is irresponsible to assume that 100 eager respondents on Facebook will convert to 100 warm bodies eager to march when there is lots of existing evidence that this is not true. People who post comments on the internet are usually inactivists. Expect no more than a small percentage of committed activists to show up out of all those on Facebook who say they will.
Until the recent UPNG disaster, university SRCs did much better at organising protests. They first laid the groundwork for protest by carrying out awareness. After that, they organised students to speak loudly and persistently with a single voice that conveys power and determination.
SRC leaders rely on awareness forums as the main education mechanism. Most students never participate, but that’s not a worry since most people are selfish and don’t do anything in life for the common good anyway. Instead, the forums are meant to reach students who care about issues and want to learn more.
It is not enough to provide facts and figures during awareness. The information must be presented in a way that is relevant to the students’ lives and aspirations, their families, and their future. People embrace the common interest through a sophisticated look at the self interest. The awareness must be such that it makes students angry as they learn the truth. Information inspires, anger motivates. Without intense motivation, students will find it hard to resist threats by authorities and persevere in boycotting classes or joining illegal protest marches.
Once the SRC has sufficiently inspired the most committed students, it’s time to use them to organise everyone else. Students usually work in provincial groups. These groups plan what kind of action to take. The organising process must result in students working together to create a loud voice that is unified and with a simple message. Such a voice will frighten opponents and attract others to join the movement. Good organising tactics keep everyone in line to speak as one voice. Whenever opponents make attempts to divide the students, students must react strongly to hold their coalition together and resist intimidation and bribery. Organising becomes more sophisticated when it uses different groups to carry out different actions. For example, a march might be backed up by a boycott, which in turn is backed up by widespread painting of graffiti outside the university campus. Organising also involves building coalitions with groups outside of campus, including the police.
The bottom line: successful protests only come out of a process of inspirational mass education that makes people angry, followed by effective organising that intimidates the opposition and inspires even slackers to join the protest movement.
The current situation: Inspirational awareness is uneven and incomplete. In particular:
-there is no simple, attractive rallying cry. In the early 2000s, the Post courier very effectively used the “Jimmy Come Home!” rally to pressure Jimmy Maladina to come back to PNG to face the courts.
-awareness activities remain too centred on the social media or on public gatherings that are infrequent and too often prohibited. Voices of concerned inactivists now dominate the internet, giving a feeling of paralysis.
- Awareness teachers tend to have only a superficial understanding of the current issues surrounding O’Neill and his government. They don’t convince their audience that they are real experts.
- Activists have thus far shown no ability to apply new inspirational awareness tactics that can get around government pressure.
- There is no voice attached to a face that can inspirationally serve as a voice of conscience for the protest movement, driving good people to take action. As a prolific, articulate writer with strong personal ethics, Lukas Kiap once served this role. For unknown reasons, he stopped his prolific writing.
So long as there is a strong clear message to unify protestors, the activist movement against corruption can be effective without having a single unifying leader. However, heaps of informal ‘mini leaders’ faceless and with faces, are a must. Together, they must create a giant, informal awareness campaign that focuses mainly on street education. The information can come from the social media, but the information is only effective if it spreads to the average person in the street.
The Arab Spring movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring) and European revolutions of 1989 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1989) provide many ideas on what might work in PNG. Every society is unique but all humans share a basic human psychology. Any successful protest movement has its starting point in being able to tap effectively into that universal psychology. The goal is nothing less than to inspire and motivate people to get out of their seats and protest in ways that intimidate the opponent into submission.
