The Strategy That Virtually Guarantees An Overwhelming PNC Victory In the 2017 Elections (Part 1)
“If you don’t like the Prime Minister, contest against him or vote for someone who is running against him!”
The above statement only has meaning if two conditions are met. First, we would all have to be constitutionally given the power to vote directly for the top leader in the land. We do not have that power and do not elect the Prime Minister directly. Only 56 votes from the 111 MPs are needed to elect the Prime Minister and that process is easily corrupted because of the many opportunities to coerce, intimidate, and bribe those MPs in return for their vote. The way PNG’s laws are currently structured, indirect payment in return for votes is probably legal even though it is unethical and corrupt.
Even in Ialibu-Pangia district, the above advice to “vote against him if you don’t like him” only works if each vote cast is counted and counted accurately. That means no intimidation or looking over the shoulders of voters. No ballot box stuffing or accidental losing of ballots. No manipulation of the voter rolls. If any voting fraud occurs, the invitation to “vote against him if you don’t like him” becomes meaningless and voting becomes a waste of time, as the outcome has been predetermined.
The above conditions are rarely met in the highland districts of PNG. Thus it is likely to be meaningless to say “if you don’t like Peter O’Neill, contest against him or vote for someone who is running against him”.
It is therefore easier said than done for the people of PNG to use the 2017 election to remove Peter O’Neill from Power.
The 2017 election is already essentially already decided. Peter O’Neill’s continuance as Prime Minister is virtually assured.
I will now describe the multi component strategy that can ensures a massive People’s National Congress (PNC) victory in the 2017 election, which will then lead fairly automatically to re-election of Peter O’Neill as Prime Minister. It is not a matter of whether this is good or bad for the country, but whether the strategy will be successful at achieving this objective.
The strategy now to be described should work not only for 2017, but also 2022, 2027, 2032 and so on as long as Peter O’Neill wants to stay in power, so long as he doesn’t make any wrong moves in managing the economy or public expenditures that anger the majority of Papua New Guineans. Even then, the Prime Minister has put measures into place to put the PNGDF and Royal Constabulary firmly under political control, and has effectively ended mass political protest by university students as well as the general public. His new Cybersecurity Act has already succeeded in intimidating those on the social media to close down their blogs and other web sites or have them be closed, removing commentary that could be hostile to the Prime Minister and other MPs in his government.
For the 2017 election, the Prime Minister’s goal is to ensure the reelection of enough PNC MPs as well as some candidates who are loyal to the Prime Minister but members of other parties. It is very possible to forget about non-PNC candidates and focus on gaining at least 56 PNC victories in the electorates, thus forming the first government in PNG history that does not require a coalition of multiple political parties joining to form government.
GRAND STRATEGY 1 – FOCUS ON RURAL, NOT URBAN, ELECTORATES
The most effective strategy for a political party to win a national election in PNG is to forget about urban voters and focus on villagers. Rural voters now make up 87% (as of 2014) of the total PNG population (World Bank statistics, see http://www.tradingeconomics.com/papua-new-guinea/rural-population-percent-of-total-population-wb-data.html).
There is no doubt that it is easiest to rig the election without detection in rural areas. Rural voter rolls are very hard to keep up-to-date and double check, unless voter rolls of urban dwellers. Voting fraud is almost impossible to control in rural areas, because either there is no witnesses to the voting fraud when it actually occurs (such as ballot stuffing), the witnesses have no training or ability to document and record the fraud that they see, witnesses are intimidated from reporting what they see, or witnesses are ignorant that what they’re observing is an illegal activity. So many candidates in the past, despite their eyewitness of election fraud, cannot win in court because they cannot afford the same level of high priced lawyers as the corrupt vote rigging candidates can afford, and they are not trained in the collection of convincing evidence.
What is now being commonly argued by corruption fighters in Port Moresby against accepting new infrastructure at face value is hard enough to get city people to understand the seriousness of. Naturally the new infrastructure may be poorly built of cheap materials, be excessively costly, and may involve contracts given to companies owned secretly by politicians, or given to cronies who give cash kickbacks to those who provided them. These arguments capture the interest of rural people even less. They have become so used to seeing no tangible products from their elected representatives that more likely than not, they are willing to accept a little bit of infrastructure rather than see another 20 or more years of nothing built. It is of no consequence to them whether there are kickbacks or not, or whether the infrastructure is modestly or outrageously priced. All they want to see is the infrastructure.
While the 13% urban voters can make loud noise against selected politicians and their actions, the results of 2015-2016 after government’s overexpenditures and mishandling of the economy is proof that no matter how loudly urban voters complain against the government, rural people will vote how they want and can be convinced to ignore their town wantoks.
It is a safe bet that urban voters are irrelevant to the 2017 election outcome. They represent less than 15% of the voting population. As a whole they maintain very little communication on political matters with their rural wantoks and so have limited influence with their viewpoints. Village wantoks tend to view their urban brothers and sisters as privileged and acting too smart, which makes them even less inclined to listen to advice that comes from the city.
Despite all this, it is possible that the boycotting PNG university students may break this barrier. However even that group consists of relatively few activist boycotters followed by a majority of students who never understood the issues behind the boycott, much less are able to explain them to people back home. The awareness campaigns where university students fanned out to all provinces reached only a tiny fraction of people back home and involved only a tiny fraction of registered university students.
GRAND STRATEGY 2 – GAIN TIGHT POLITICAL CONTROL OVER THE ELECTORAL COMMISSION
Electoral commission is easiest to manipulate if it is made powerless, for example by funding cuts. This the current government has done.
Because the Prime Minister appoints the head of the Electoral Commission, there are legal mechanisms to destroy the neutrality of the Electoral Commission so that that Commission will present no obstacle to the overall strategy of winning the election. The Commission then has the potential of being politicized.
Articles in the newspapers over the past few months have stated contradictory things. It has been said that the Electoral Commission is very short on money, followed by articles that state the government will come to the rescue to the electoral commission. The Prime Minister’s Chief Secretary has said he will work closely with the electoral commission. This would easily be used to violate the neutrality needed for the Electoral Commission to ensure a free and fair election. The new director of the Electoral Commission is said to be a crony of the Prime Minister. Is this true?
Once the Electoral Commission comes under the tight control of the government, it can both prevent tampering with the voter rolls by the Opposition parties and others, while opening the door to the government itself tampering with the voter rolls.
In part two we will look at the 3rd strategy of the grand plan that would allow the PNC to win the 2017 election in a landslide
