What is Development?

Part 1: Medicine

We have all been thinking and talking about the definition of 'Development' especially within the dilemma we find ourselves in, in Papua New Guinea regarding this question. 

There are many controversies and contradictions concerning not only the ideal path we wish to follow, but also our development choices, the advantages of certain choices and also the negative aspects of some of our choices. 

For sure we cannot all be happy about the various development choices we have to make, but one of the crucial considerations of development lies in the nature of the acquisition of collective consent about our national choices, goals and objectives. 

Every society, every country requires a systematic procedure towards arriving at collective consent. Many traditional societies in Papua New Guinea could offer our national governments so many models of seeking, negotiating and acquiring community consent. In our traditional philosophies we even have names for many of these methods. Yet like every other democracy on earth, Papua New Guinea's democracy struggles with acquiring public consent for our national decisions.

We have maybe too often heard the rhetoric about 'development principles' but often the actual principles behind the choices we make as a collective entity, fail to manifest themselves in the form of collective human satisfaction and harmony. 

The effort it takes for any country to arrive at collective consent on any development issue is very difficult to attain. As a result, as we see in Papua New Guinea, and even in the United States of America, the fine art of acquiring collective consent is often avoided altogether. 

Some members of parliament like Moses Maladina, try to invent policy loop holes that can help Parliament to avoid the task of acquiring public consent, but rather seek to bulldoze laws through parliament without public information, debate and collective decision making. Others spend their time in parliament as specialists in filibustering while others, our 'yo-yo' members, spend their time crossing floors and just playing the numbers game. So it happens that we can very easily make a mockery out of our systems of state and thus we also see our country committing a major failure in one of the crucial principles of national development: the achievement of collective consent. 

And let us not forget: the true art and objective of politics and parliamentarianism is to seek to acquire public support for public proposals and programmes - not to just be in government.

Why is it so difficult to acquire collective consent? I may get back to this at a later issue. Today I want to deal with one of the crucial ingredients of collective consent:

The recognition of Common Values. 

In Papua New Guinea Tok Pisin, we call this 'Luksave'.

I will take the example of Health and Medicine for this first installment because this is one of the things our rural people cry out for when they want 'Development'. Rural people all over Papua New Guinea are signing away their rights to their natural livelihood on the land because they want schools, roads and hospitals.

We all want good health. But at what point can we as a country arrive at the common recognition of this value - in a way that we can approach our health development programmes in a systematic manner, without too much argument and fuss along the way, about what our priorities are, what are the standards, what are the best medicines, what is the best medical equipment and technology available on the international market, what kind of facilities to build first and where, how do we maintain our existing facilities, and at the end how do we build a reliable health system in which all our people and cultures may have faith?

My good friend, an Egyptian doctor working in Goroka in 1994, Dr. Adel El Mezin Ibrahim, told me once that: "Medicine is common sense".

So today I look back at our country, floundering with indecision, and sometimes suffering from a seemingly lack of commitment to the perseverance needed for establishing the right health system for Papua New Guinea. And I ask myself how we may, on our own, with our own human, material and financial resources, run, manage and maintain for a long time, a sustainable health system, until the very culture of proper health care and awareness becomes an internalised part and action in the psychology of all our people?

Everywhere I go, I'm always befriending medical doctors, medical researchers, anyone that can give me a clue about the riddle that riddles our people. I have flown from many very rural places in Papua New Guinea accompanying sick people who do not know their way to an urban hospital from the airport, offering to take them there myself - some of them so sick and suffering from things like tropical ulcers that the whole aircraft could smell like there was a very large dead animal on board. My heroes are those pilots who fly those little aeroplanes into the clouds of the various PNG mountains, some of them never to return.

Like many fellow Papua New Guineans, I have seen the look on many people's faces in the last hours before their death, I too have carried the bleeding and I feel that sometimes the blood leaves permanent marks on the back of my shoulders. I still hear the voice of the last person I tried to rescue in Goroka: His last words to me were: "Martin, mi no nap pilim wanpela samting long nek blo mi igo daun long lek. (Martin, I can't feel anything from my neck down to my feet). 

So I can understand our urgency, our strife and our cry for development. But it would be detrimental to consistent development in one were to proceed and to operate in crisis mode. We need to be systematic. We have to use our common sense. But we have to recognise our needs and to act appropriately and accordingly. We have to strive to create an environment of collective comfort and benefit for all our people. Then at one point in the future we may find that we can actually walk together.

Last week I was talking to a medical doctor, Dr. Wagner and his wife in Rottweil, Germany. We were talking about super bugs, and other medical considerations that I get curious about. Eventually, I ventured to ask Dr. Wagner, where we are as humans in our advancement in medicine. And together with his wife, they told me something that I felt was worth reflecting upon and sharing with all our people.

Dr. Wagner: In the last one hundred years, the greatest advance in medicine came in two main areas: 

1. Recognising that we must separate our drinking water from our sewage water. This recognition led humanity to successfully combat Cholera and many other diseases caused by the contamination of drinking water.

2. The second was recognising the fact that we have to separate our rubbish from our living environment. This recognition led to a cleaner living environment, free of infectious diseases that spring from the accumulation of waste.

I was quite surprised and happily shocked by the simplicity of his deduction. So I thought I'd probe further. I asked Dr. Wagner about the medical advances and research into, the identification of various kinds of bacteria and viruses and he agreed, but insisted that these advances cannot overshadow that medical advancement in the two areas he had mentioned.

And so what about penicillin I asked him... 

Dr. Wagner: The industrialised mass production of penicillin was perfected around 1945. Yes penicillin was an important discovery... at this point, Frau Wagner cut in to offer an explanation:

Frau Wagner: Penicillin cannot make a big difference to human health if we do not organise in order to avoid the danger of continuously re-infecting ourselves.

And there it was from Frau Wagner: a reiteration that even the great medical discovery of penicillin could not overshadow those two great steps mankind had taken in the advancement of medical science which her husband had spoken about.

Sixteen years after my conversation with Dr. Ibrahim, Frau Wagner was telling me again that chemical advancement alone, cannot replace common sense in Medical Science. So I was transported back in space to Papua New Guinea and the ample rhetoric we have heard over the years about development and health care, asking myself the same questions we ask over and over again about the state of our health system. 

Back to our dilemma of development and the acquisition of collective consent in development directions, I think it is time that our people stop accepting to be led blind by rhetorical slogans. We should require that our public officials give the public the basic confidence and belief, that we can endeavour, to achieve collective vision and progress. They need to challenge, to prosecute and to continuously debate reflections on the public good, and derive from those reflections, information that they themselves trust, so that they may be clear about what they want to say to the public. We need to be better informed collectively, so that our common sense can inform and facilitate our collective consent. 

Sapos yumi olgeta i kamap long wanpela luksave, em bai yumi hariap tasol, bai yumi wanbel long wanem kain plan yumi laik bihainim.  - The secret to collective consent lies in first achieving common recognition of shared values. 

Dilemma of Leadership and Governance

The Pacific country of Papua New Guinea has come to another crucial crossroad in its development considerations. This week the discussions and controversies surrounding the Ramu Nickel Mine in its coastal province of Madang flared again due to the recent National Court decision not to lift an injunction on the Ramu Nickel Mine.

The fear of the Madang people is about the mining tailings and the waste management of tailings because the mining company proposed to dump mine tailings directly into the sea. This is a genuine fear and really should have been taken seriously by the government of Papua New Guinea, respected by other Papua New Guineans and the Chinese mining company as well.

Cart before the Horse? photo: http://i.zdnet.com/blogs/cart-before-the-horse.png

Instead, the government of Papua New Guinea went to unnatural efforts to silence the voices of its own people. It made amendments to existing and legitimate laws in order to facilitate the mining contractor's exploitation of the nickel mine and it acted in many ways to hinder the powers of its own state departments tasked with policing mining and other large scale resource extraction practices. But worst of all, the government of Papua New Guinea even proceeded to remove the basic rights of its own people which had been enshrined under the National Constitution.

Mining is responsible for the greatest strife in the history of Papua New Guinea when it caused a civil war to erupt on Bougainville, a former province of Papua New Guinea, in 1989. Bougainville has now gained its own autonomous rule and government, but the cost of human life was great for a small country which saw a civil war that went on for almost three times the length of the second world war, claimed more than twenty thousand lives and shocked a nation which had never imagined its army pointing guns at its own people. But after more than fifteen years of civil war, this blemish now stands to forever be a stain in the history of a once hopeful nation.

Now thousands of Madang people are greatly concerned about their own livelihood and the future state of its unique marine environment and the sea on its coastline into which a Chinese mining company plans to dump the nickel mine's tailings waste.

Papua New Guinean government officials say that the delay in these mining plans will affect the national economy and future investment. Criticism from the government aimed at NGOs especially those issuing from the Honorable James Pundari who wants to create a government body which polices the activities of NGOs should also be taken seriously. These statements should be considered from many perspectives. 

Two things perhaps should be first recognised and considered amidst the frustration of government leaders and officials: 

One, that the country has not had an effective opposition since the passing away of Sir Yambaky Okuk. Papua New Guinea misses such a leader today as Sir Yambaky. Although he himself was not free of political controversy, he was notorious worldwide as being one of the most effective and fiery leaders of the opposition of any modern democracy.

The second question concerns the intentions of the Papua New Guinean government to create a watchdog tasked with watching NGO activism in the country. NGOs and civil society in today's Papua New Guinea, form one of the few effective oppositions to a seemingly "dictatorial" democracy, which itself is active in trying to silence its own Ombudsman Commission by formulating policies which hinder the Ombudsman Commission's roles and activities.

Herein lies a dilemma and perhaps the hypocrisy of a governmental regime concerned with silencing opposition to the excesses and errors of its own political practice while at the same time active in its policy efforts to create loop holes that could advance unaccountability. Many people see Papua New Guinea's politics to now be on a path to creating super individuals out of leaders elected by ordinary citizens into public office. This indicates that our politicians are assuming the ordinary mandate to public service to mean a licence to wield absolute and oppressive powers.

The Ombudsman is the legitimate watchdog that watches all forms of public leadership. NGOs countrywide respect the role of the Ombudsman Commission. A couple of years ago NGO leaders of Papua New Guinea even pointed out to our Ombudsmen and Ombudswomen during an NGO leadership gathering with the Ombudsman Commisioners, that in the future, there may be a need to explore the idea of an extension of its functions to include the scrutiny of corrupt practices in our own NGO leadership. We wanted this to also include the scrutiny of the leadership of church based organisations where corruption has also been experienced by many of our communities. This point concerning governance and leadership is about the conduct of people who are elected to posts of public responsibility and their abuse of that public trust and the abuse of whatever public office to which they are elected or employed to serve a community.

At this juncture, it is probably time to look at our national dilemma of leadership and governance and to look at the pretexts offered to ordinary Papua New Guineans as the grounds and reasoning as to why it is necessary and rational for politicians to require next to absolute powers while at the same time, trying to hinder the powers of any legitimate opposition to and scrutiny of the nature of their practises. 

Our politicians and government officials express that they carry on as they do under the duress of legitimate concern for the national welfare and development aspirations of Papua New Guinea. But what really is this development that they seek for Papua New Guinea? Ordinary people require some evidence of a systematic drive at least to manage and maintain existing public assets and infrastructure prior to undertaking new and more demanding tasks. People need to witness a consistent and explicit investment in our children's education and in our health facilities. They need to see their government investing a greater effort in the business interests of our rural people. If our politicians really believe that a mine is an activity in which surrounding communities can fully participate in and benefit from, then they should show the people what causes our leaders and public officials to have such a strong faith in mining. They should provide and show financial flow plans where royalties from mines would actually be found to improve the local people's livelihoods. They need to show us a single mining community on Earth which had a vibrant economy after the end of a mining activity. Yet, this is not at all the issue that the Madang people are facing.

The people of Madang are simply opposed to the proposed method of mining waste management. They reject the mining company's proposal of dumping mining tailings directly into the sea for the next decades of the life of the Ramu Nickel Mine. The government and the mining company should accept this concern and invest a considerable effort in finding better alternatives, instead of concerning themselves with destroying the people's democracy and the national constitution which protects our basic human rights and legitimate wish to survive in a comfortable environment.