Is passenger shipping in PNG lucrative?

If you multiply 100 passengers by K100, that means Star Shipping makes over K100,000 per trip on anyone of its 50 year old boats from Rabaul to Lae. If you say 10 trips in a month, it makes a million or more each month.

If the crew and captain can just load passengers and overload the boat at will, they also pocket on the side several thousands per trip. Several hundred thousands per month. A million or more every year. In order to keep his lucrative monopoly strong, Sharp and his employees have no doubt used every method possible.

And we and our authorities have let him get away with it. 

 Mekere when he was once PM said corruption in the State mechanisms is systemic and systematic.  It reaches from the top, to the very bottom.

We are learning now that Papua New Guinea’s institutionalised corruption also has the power to kill over 100 or so blacks in a matter of hours.  

Will Sharps monopoly continue? Will Sharp and his companies be made to answer for the tragedy? We really dont know….nothing seems to have happened to Airlines PNG despite the horrible crash last year.

We have a bad culture in our government, started by the Father of this nation, Sir Michael Somare GC. Instead of regulating the development of Papua New Guinea and maintaining standards, he decided the Government must instead be partners in business.  They were willing to give business concessions were need be, such as handing out state land on silver platters to South Seas Tuna or RH for Vision City to by-passing environmental regulations and giving license quickly to Ramu Nickel.

 Our politicians have become businessmen…they want to bring business. 

 But Money, Power, Politics, its a recipe for a dangerous kind of businessman, one who overlooks the need for regulations and standards to be kept for the betterment of Papua New Guinea and her future generations. 

This politician-businessesman only wants to encourage business… But for whom?

When retired army officer Yaura Sasa tried to stage a mutiny and placed Brig General Agwi under house arrest recently, he called a press conference.

 In that press conference he sent a message assuring ‘investors’ that all was well in PNG. He did not assure us, the citizens, he assured the investors. He spoke Somare’s language.

 Yet, if something happened, the investors wont be the ones who suffer or die. They will run away with their millions. 

Years ago, BCL and all the foreigners who operated in Bougainville before the crisis didnt stick around when it erupted and Papua New Guineans fought Papua New Guineans. Such a dark stain on our history yet we seem oblivious to its lesson.

We must seriously ask ourselves, who is running this country…the politicians, or those who control the monopolies. 

With Somare pushed aside,  have things really changed?  His voice somehow still seems to echo in the PM Oneil regime.

 When Lae burned during the riots, the newly minted PM Oneil sent a message to assure the investors that all would be alright in Lae…For the citizens, they sent the police in with live bullets. There was little girl who got raped on her way to school a day or two before the Lae riots began. She was abducted at the Eriku bus stop in broad daylight. No one sent a message to her.

As misguided as some of the Lae youths were, they fought and died for this little girls right to catch the bus to school without worrying about being raped at 8 am in the morning.

 The Government seems to have less and less time for the people.

 Our leaders still want to fly in investors/business partners personally on chartered private flights. And cause international incidents in the process. 

Why cant they cause international incidents by breaking laws to ship in all the oxygen the Port Moresby General Hospital needs. Almost 100 percent of patients in desperate need of oxygen die at POM Gen because there is none in supply. 

And now they say the Parliament is the supreme power in this land, answerable only to God…

Yet, God seems always missing from press statements…the messages are always to assure the ‘investors.’

 Maybe these faceless ‘investors’ are our new God. Parliament, the Haus Tambaran, is the place of worship, and the leaders are our priests who practice rituals of Parliament sessions and challenging each other to fights to  apease these new Gods.

George Orwells Animal Farm in way has found  a new form in Papua New Guinea, less cold war and more melanesian cargo cultists in Armani suits. 

If early next week, ONeil suspends or terminates the licence of Mr Sharp’s shipping company, sacks all the port workers of Rabaul, and orders that the State and Star Shipping pay a hefty compensation for the families of each and every one of the victims of the RQ tragedy, including survivors, deceased and missing, then I will begin to believe he is less Somare 2.0. If he goes further to launch an investigation specifically to break the formation of future monopolies operating on our oceans and other industries, then I will believe change will come and the stranglehold corruption has on Papua New Guinea will come to an end.

Because, if he doesn’t, the writing is on the wall.

This is how George Orwells Animal Farm ends:

“Years pass on Animal Farm, and the pigs become more and more like human beings—walking upright, carrying whips, and wearing clothes. Eventually, the seven principles of Animalism, known as the Seven Commandments and inscribed on the side of the barn, become reduced to a single principle reading “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Napoleon entertains a human farmer named Mr. Pilkington at a dinner and declares his intent to ally himself with the human farmers against the laboring classes of both the human and animal communities. He also changes the name of Animal Farm back to the Manor Farm, claiming that this title is the “correct” one. Looking in at the party of elites through the farmhouse window, the common animals can no longer tell which are the pigs and which are the human beings. “ 

In time, just like the animals we will not be able to tell who the ‘investors’ are and who our leaders are.

Maybe we can’t tell anymore.  

The final line in Animal Farm goes, “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which” (10.32).