Would the Dead Grandmother Have Been Able to Buy Your New Buai License, Powes Parkop Or Did You Forget the Poor Again?
What a waste of life and of K4 million the buai ban ended up being! The buai ban wasn’t less than 100% successful, as Powes Parkop is now trying to convince us, but more like 10% successful, and even that 10% is going to be out the door by New Years. For shame, Powes Parkop, for shame!
And what a funny photo on the front page of the National, which shows City Rangers emptying betelnut and daka onto the streets, littering the streets. No uniforms, we notice. No obvious signs that they represent city law enforcement. Instead they might be mistaken as conmen on the take, which might in fact be their side occupations.
What a complete hoax that photo is too! Yet another attempt by Parkop PR Ltd to convince us of something that definitely is not reality. You can be sure that right after that photo was taken, these city rangers were frantically gathering up all that thrown away buai and pocketing it for their later use or resale. The buai ban set new standards for acceptable corruption in Port Moresby. For shame, Powes Parkop, for shame! It’s all because of you!
But what is this new nonsense about licensing? Is this another Parkop scam to reward political friends and local supporters? How much is this license going to cost or is it going to be free? Who is going to issue these licenses? Where is the money for these licenses going to go and how does the public know that the license money is not going to go into some private pockets?
Most of all, how are elderly grandmothers like the late Mrs Veronica Memi Onne, whose life ended because of the foolish buai ban, going to get a betelnut selling license? For that matter, how are ANY poor people going to be able to afford such a license?
Shameful Parkop had his chance to give us the answers to such questions of compassion before we had to ask. But he didn’t bother and the reason is that Powes Parkop shows no compassion. The best he ever does is to react to other people’s compassion.
The buaii ban has also shown us once again that Powes Parkop is a follower, not a leader. He follows the smell of money, he follows the Happy Gardener as if he were the Gardener’s lapdog or his boyfriend. He follows his dictatorial hero, Peter O’Neill, and he only responds (again this is following, not leading) when people finally have had enough of his foolishness and start yelling. But rarely does Powes Parkop even have to react to yellowing. He knows that the middle class are being mesmerised right now by the appearance of extraordinarily expensive but impressive urban streets and the bang bang bang of hammers and activity everywhere. As far as the poor are concerned, Powes Parkop knows that elderly grandmothers and other struggling poor people are cursed with being brought up to have too much respect for false idols and failed leaders. The poor will never challenge Powes Parkop which means he gets away with doing whatever he wants to them, including being complicit in their deaths.
Is this wasteful disaster now coming to an end? Not quite, because Powes Parkop still hangs on to hope against hope and now is going to try licensing the sellers. It will be a failure too, you can count on it. This is what will happen.
1. Licenses will be issued, probably to Parkop supporters, 2. Buai sellers who doesn’t have a licence will come back and quietly blend in with the licensed buai sellers. 3. The city rangers will check who has licenses and who doesn’t. They’ll demand bribes from those who don’t have licenses. 4. The police, having far more important things to do than checking buai selling licenses, won’t get involved. 5. The whole licensing system will become corrupted by bribes paid to the city rangers, allowing them to achieve another, even higher level in corruption. 6. The elderly grandmothers and other poor people who can pay neither for the licenses nor can afford the bribes demanded by the city rangers, will end up having their betelnut confiscated by the city rangers, who then consume and re-sell it themselves. Finally the poor give up. Some may turn to stealing. All thanks to Powes Parkop because it will be because of him if the poor aren’t legally allowed to sell buai.
So now you can see into the crystal ball, Powes Parkop, and know the future. You don’t have to wait until April to assess the success of licensing. We’ve just shown you how and why it’s going to be another Parkop disaster. So stop the nonsense and start looking at the big picture.
Dear governor, if you want a beautiful mango tree to grow, first you have to prepare the soil properly. That means that your first and strongest priority must be to establish an effective training programme for NCDC police and city rangers that convince them that behaving ethically and responsibly is in their best interest. Weed out the incorrigible and chronically corrupt for whom no amount of training is going to straighten out. End the police brutality. Reward those enforcers who perform well. For those who don’t, stop giving them slap on the wrist style punishments. Don’t start and stop with termination. Send them to jail for a while.
Next dear governor, learn the lesson of doing things one small step at a time if you want any kind of change that lasts. Over donkeys years, we’ve had enough examples of big developments followed by big collapses. If you want anything to last, you need to develop the structures slowly. Not all at once like BAM BAM BAM now buai selling is banned! That way of doing things didn’t work and it will never work.
Finally dear governor, start realising that you can’t legislate longtime habits that are a part of culture. You’re not even going to get people to chew in only certain areas of the city. People will continue to chew wherever they want. You may think you can control their behaviour by punishing them, but as long as you have law enforcers with the level of incompetence of both the Port Moresby police and the city rangers, you’ll fail and fail miserably..
