O’NEILL SAGA OF CORRUPTION AND DICTATORSHIP NEARING ITS FINAL PHASE: EVIL FIGHTS BACK
by GEORGE TRIASI
The amazing advertisement run by Peter O’Neill in yesterday’s (Friday) newspapers is a masterpiece of political theatre in a banana republic. Banana republic is an insulting term used worldwide to refer to a tropical country that has a weak economy, dishonest government, public services that do not work or any combination of these. Banana republic dictators and their servant politicians usually behave like clowns, unable to think intellectually and speaking like children. When you hear a politician reduced to such statements as “telling my people too much will only confuse them” you know you’re in a banana republic. Welcome to Papua New Guinea.
PNG has long been a banana republic but Prime Minister Peter O’Neill has taken us to the highest level ever in this category. The government right now doesn’t even have enough money to honour its 2016 funding commitments to health and education services, yet Peter O’Neill thinks nothing of submitting a costly 2 page full colour advertisement. Never expect this man to consider frugality when it comes to government spending. For him, it’s more important to financially support his 2 most important government mouthpieces, the Post Courier and National, or maybe his intent was to perpetuate the lie that PNG’s finances are in good order, and the government has enough money to pay its bills.
Analysis of the Advertisement
The photo in the advert of a solemn, authoritative, and respectable PM is destroyed by his anguished words throughout the advertisement. The tone of the advert indicates a man who has finally been shaken out of his Psychopath mental illness and starting to understand that the game is very nearly up for Peter O’Neill.
The advertisement is full of the usual lies, manipulated facts, and half truths that Peter O’Neill is famous for. As always, he assumes that Papua New Guineans who are literate enough to read the newspapers are also ignorant enough to not know anything about the Paul Paraka payment scams and National Fraud and Anti-Corruption Office closure other than what Peter O’Neill describes in his advertisement. Hopefully the students will expand their awareness efforts throughout the country and educate all of us as to the facts of the matter.
Our Prime Minister tries every angle to convince the students to call off their boycott and give up without achieving their most important objective. He tells the students they are being manipulated by “outside influence” and that they are disrespecting their parents. He adds the usual distortions about how much money his government has been investing in education. On the ground, you can hardly see billions of kina of investment and the most logical explanation is that most of the money is being stolen.
There is no doubt that much of the content of this advertisement either comes from the Prime Minister’s own shaky hand or from an increasingly nervous adviser. The childish use of CAPITAL LETTERS TO SHOUT AT US in the advert doesn’t create the image of a man in control of the situation. Laughably, he screams at us that he is NOT A COMMON CRIMINAL. We can imagine that he’s shaking his finger at the students as he demands “Respect my rights and the rights of others,” which of course conveniently ignores the fact that his perpetration and expansion of government corruption and financial mismanagement is destroying the rights of those “others” i.e. millions of citizens who will now never attain the standard of living that such a resource rich nation as PNG should be offering.
Refusal To Step Down
More than once in his advertisement, Peter O’Neill tells us I WILL NOT STEP ASIDE. Again he seems to be shouting at us, while displaying his callous disrespect for the nation he supposedly serves. He seems willing to pull the country down with him if we won’t let him continue destroying PNG.
Peter ONeill has thrown all fighters for good in Papua New Guinea, including the boycotting university students, the final challenge: Either give up and slink away in shame, or proudly take the struggle to higher levels to end this evil man’s oppressive rule over PNG. In PNG we often have taken the easy way out and suffered as a result. Let’s hope we learnt something from those lessons and don’t back down to the likes of Peter O’Neill.
Sinister Actions In the Background
Although the tone and words of the advert are good evidence that the Prime Minister is distressed and worried about his future, he has plenty of lavishly paid “friends” who will not only give him advice on how to stay in power, but also carry out actions on his behalf, hoping to protect their doorway to continued wealth. Evil attracts evil and Peter O’Neill is surrounded by scoundrels and cheats of the likes that would be appalling to any true Christian. They are the ones willing to pay for investigations to find out and reveal the skeletons in the closet of anyone who dares oppose Peter O’Neill. If that doesn’t work, it will be they, not the Prime Minister, who sends out the thugs to intimidate the most effective outspoken opponents of the PM. Peter O’Neill’s groupies are happy to sing songs of praise, write glowing reports of his achievements, and heave up other kinds of literary vomit.
Although part of the Prime Minister’s frustration is the realization that he doesn’t have an easy way to get control over the boycotting students, our youth would be foolish indeed to think that they cannot be defeated by this cunning man and his allies. Do not think that those on the side of evil are not capable of carrying out sabotage of one kind or another to try and cause irreparable damage to the student boycott movement. While you plan, they plan too. The Prime Minister will not give up his power without a major fight.
M. Gandhi’s Process Of Achieving Justice
We are entering a phase in the fight for justice that India freedom fighter Gandhi called “they will fight you”. Before that came the phases of “they will ignore you” and “they will laugh at you”. Both phases could be seen in how Peter O’Neill kept his opponents under control up to now. That is because until now, there has been no serious threat to his power. His political opponents are, with hardly any exception, nearly as corrupt as he is. The Prime Minister has always used that situation to blackmail them into silence.
The students destroyed that stability, where for the most part, the corrupt were keeping the corrupt silent. Social media voices activated the students, in fact many social media voices today are university students. The social media-boycotting students combination is something the Prime Minister must break if he wants to stay in power. Gandhi’s prediction that “they will fight you” has begun. It involves doing whatever is necessary to silence the main voices of opposition to the Prime Minister and break down any organized effort to oppose him. Social media will probably be the first target. Despite the importance and prominence those who use it give the social media, most Papua New Guineans wouldn’t notice if the social media was shut down. On the other hand, if students were strongly repressed, the word would spread, using our famous coconut wireless, to all towns and most villages.
Expect possible dirty fighting against those who are simply speaking up for what’s right.
Are Students Prepared For the Fight?
There have been voices of concern that university students started their boycott without much forward planning or idea of how to turn boycotts into successful campaigns.
Whether the students will win, and how long the fight will last, depends upon how quickly the students mobilise the rest of PNG to stand up to Peter O’Neill. All the NGOs have accomplished is to show the nation how ineffective they are at organizing more than small groups of people and powerful the police are at intimidating them. These are steps backwards.
The people of Port Moresby in general are a long ways from risking their safety to stand up against the Prime Minister. They are not going to strike or protest march, no matter how many times Noah Anjo, Lukas Kiap and others set the date on the social media. Peter O’Neill is determined to make protest marches high risk, thus shutting down this option to those demanding that he step down. Anjo and Kiap refuse to take the step of civil disobedience and getting arrested by going ahead with the protest march, whether or not it is legal. None of this is a good example for the students.
On the other hand a national boycott can work. No protest march and no strikes. National boycott means staying home from work in mass, with workers giving some kind of excuse such as illness to the boss. It means thousands of people starting to hang out on the streets doing nothing, in numbers too large for the police to deal with.
Thousands of people might be willing to do this if the students set a clear starting day and time for the boycott and get the PMV operators on their side.
However this is not the time for that announcement. For one thing the people of PNG have to hear the announcement from credible spokespeople. The only credible spokespeople in this action are the students, the boycotting students have not yet organized themselves into a unified voice that that proclaim SICK IN BOYCOTT, and government is still effectively keeping the people of PNG from hearing anything the students say.
There are too many people in PNG who don’t really know what’s going on. That includes being educated on the missteps and corruptions of Peter O’Neill.
The students must start with a much broader and intense national awareness effort that leaves the universities and reaches into communities throughout PNG. This awareness, if done intensely enough will result in some prominent members of the public standing up and speaking out. It means pastors starting to talk about the evilness of the Peter O’Neill regime . The awareness alone will begin to energise the people of PNG and that’s when it will be time to call a SICK IN boycott that lasts until the Prime Minister steps down.
Fighting a powerful opponent only works when the other side responds by the tens of thousands. Without that support there is no hope of winning this battle against evil.
