Today’s CIMC forum was well worth
attending, especially because participants were able to get beyond some of the
typical civil-servant-speak that comes illustrated by very dry powerpoint Venn
diagrams and bullets about today’s policy and how it is marginally improved
from yesterday’s policy…and beyond the drone of ‘We should, the government
must, we need to, they have to, it should be…’ and so forth---to almost
practical ideas. Very exciting to hear Joseph Suwamaru today, who left the
telecommunications industry to get a PhD at DWU on the social and economic
impact of ICT and mobile telephony in PNG (great thesis topic), who presented a
model that seemed almost too easy to be true, but one that points to a way
beyond this awful private-public morass in ICT today, which has some of us
paying ungodly monthly fees for internet services that cost one-one-hundredth
as much in Australia or elsewhere, and where rural mobile phone users must walk
to the mountain top and to ledges named ‘Hello-Goodbye’ and ‘ID23’ to catch a
network, only to waste all their money on calls that drop to message services.
Joseph Suwamaru’s brilliant idea
involves pooling all the available private and public ICT capabilities, and
enhancing the current fiber optic opportunities (which
include---unbelievably—accessing the papa fiber optic cable that runs from Guam
to Sydney and comes near shore right by the Kalibobo lighthouse here in Madang)—to
provide PNG with world class communications, and in so doing, solve most of our
service delivery bottlenecks in one swoop. He spoke about the mobile phone
applications being used today in India, Uganda, South Africa and
elsewhere---including SMS pop quizzes from Health Departments on the causes and
symptoms of HIV/AIDS, as part of their public awareness programs; laparoscopic
surgery performed by teams of surgeons online in real time from different parts
of the globe; curricula distributed by internet; education in general moving
online…it’s a revolution that could be sparked by the simplest adjustments from
Telikom and the national government.
During lunch Paul Barker
interrupted my rambling on about this with a digital image from his camera. “Is
this the cable you mean?” he asked, and there it was: the frayed and miserable
fiber optic link offshore Madang, apparently damaged not long after it was
installed—and yet to be repaired.
The gaps in
service delivery are enormous, and sometimes they seem to parallel the yawning
gaps between these symposia and what happens on the ground. Talk for whom? So
much jargon, so much tedium. And it is not relieved by the MPs and Department
heads to fly in and out to open and close such for a only, never spending
enough time to be fully briefed on the few good ideas that arise from
them—maybe reading the book edited a year or so later.
But as we search for ways to
connect people to markets, to health services, to education, we are reminded
that the ICT developments of the urban elite are continually ticking away, and
that there are enormous benefits to be seen already, even from the minority of
fully connected PNG citizens. That imagined community is powerful, if not fully
democratic.
In the past ten months Papua New
Guinea has been thrice devastated by catastrophe, and plunged into a sustained.
Constitutional crisis. The social media is having a field day. In August of
2011, after Sir Michael had languished for months in a Singapore hospital
following heart surgery (during which time his son and heir apparent announced
his retirement from politics), a coterie of disaffected younger politicians
seized office, declared his seat vacant, and installing Peter O’Neill as PM.
Coming barely weeks after the Egyptian Spring, and in the midst of global cried
for democracy, the founding father of Papua New Guinea never looked more like
an aging dictator than he did then, as cries for transparency and democracy
created a groundswell across the country and bubbled up loudly in the very new,
very raw social media.
Until then, PNG’s public discourse
was print media, and the print media had been dominated by two newspapers, one
wholly owned by a Malaysian logging giant and an overt supporter of the Somare
regime. Barely a handful of social commentators had taken to the web by then,
forming blogs and web discussion groups, and talking amongst themselves, as NGO
voices. But since August this entire scene has exploded, as facebook and fb
chat groups crackle with daily rants about the current and former
administrations, and who is to blame, who is to succeed the current
Constitutional crisis (as Sir Michael continues to fight for his seat in the
courts). Now, though, the discussion is growing ever more boisterous as scorned
girlfriends, loose cannons, self-appointed authorities of all stripes begin to
de-friend other voices and scabrously libel each other on the net in ways that
would and could never happen in traditional PNG societies, where face to face
courtesy is absolutely de rigueur. Every morning I wake up excited by the
prospect of mud being slung across the networks of PNG social media. A growing
number of smart phone participants have begun contributing from remote sites as
well, wherever they can pick up the signal supplied by the ubiquitous Irish
mobile provider, Digicel.
The whole discussion has had deep
melancholic strains, too, as the country has endured a succession of man-made
disasters that seem to be the legacy of neglect and corruption from the former
administration (which has been rumored to have bled PNG of roughly 500 million
$US in the past decade). While the national elites were busy feathering nests
overseas, and accumulating impressive real estate portfolios, they were also
inviting bizarre domestic investments that have left us with controversial nickel
mines, industrial ports, half-built casinos; a sport stadium, private jet and a
palace for the Chief; not to mention lavish state affairs for their new Asian
partnerships. As if the ancestors had been angered, we have now seen a Dash-8
crash with families of university graduates all killed; a landslide that
smothered three entire villages in the area where ExxonMobil is drilling for
liquefied natural gas; and just recently a ferry disaster that lost perhaps as
many as 100 young children returning from the outer islands to school on the
mainland. Poor oversight, bad maintenance, and blatant corruption have played
their part. And people are fed up.
The social media has never before
been so anti-social, so angry and active. The Melanesian way involved restorative
justice rather than retribution and vengeance, and so people continually strive
to find a working solution rather than to punish the guilty. But that process
is never polite, and always includes a fair degree of cross-allegations and
libel, with demands for outrageous compensation. The new social media couldn’t
be better suited to its purpose here.
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