ACCORDING to legend, tribesmen from the Asaro river valley in the remote eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG) first began covering their bodies in white clay and donning grotesque, swollen-headed masks to make their enemies think they were spirits. On a brisk June afternoon in Goroka, the capital of Eastern Highlands province, a dozen Asaro Mud Men, as they are colloquially known, moved slowly and deliberately through a crowd of hundreds gathered on a dusty field, bows drawn and spears in hand. Elsewhere members of another local tribe danced in a circle in leaf skirts and ornate feathered headdresses. A band played up-tempo reggae while buses and lorries festooned with fern fronds and draped with campaign posters for Gabriel Igaso, the would-be parliamentarian whose rally this was, drove slowly through the crowd, packed with cheering supporters. Much of the town turned out for the afternoon’s entertainment.
Rallies like this have taken place across PNG since April 20th, when campaign season began. Voting in the country’s five-yearly general election started on June 24th and continues until July 8th, assuming all goes according to plan. But voting has already been delayed in Port Moresby, the capital, and complaints about unpaid election workers and the poorly maintained electoral roll have caused kerfuffles elsewhere. The inhospitable terrain and atrocious roads make getting ballots and observers to rural areas time-consuming and difficult—hence the drawn-out schedule. Results are due to be announced on July 24th. Then begins the potentially even longer and more tortuous process of forming a government.
Peter O’Neill, the incumbent prime minister, has managed to hold his rickety coalition together for the past five years, though not without controversy. He took office in 2011 on an anti-corruption platform, but allegations of graft have dogged his tenure. He disbanded Taskforce Sweep, an anti-corruption body he had created on entering government, when it began investigating him. The police got as far as issuing an arrest warrant for him and the finance minister over allegations of fraudulent payments to a local law firm (both men deny wrongdoing), before the case got bogged down in a legal mire. Last year police shot at dozens of students protesting against the government.
Whether all this has diminished Mr O’Neill’s standing with voters is unclear. His party appears well financed, and elections in PNG are always unpredictable. Political parties, of which there are 45, are weak; most candidates run as independents. A local in Goroka explains, “Our elections are not like yours, where you look at a candidate’s degrees and policies. Here you have to vote your wantok”—a word in Tok Pisin, the national lingua franca, that literally means “one talk”, ie, people who speak the same language. PNG has some 7.6m people and around 850 languages, so the wantok is something akin to a clan. “If my candidate wins,” explains the man from Goroka hopefully, “I will get some benefits.”
PNG’s system of limited preferential voting allows voters to select up to three candidates, in order of preference. Candidates with the fewest first-preference votes are eliminated, with their votes going to the next candidate named on the ballot, until one candidate attains a majority. The hope was that people would vote for a clansman with their first preference, but would base their other two choices on less parochial qualities. In practice, wantoks simply trade preferential votes. Candidates are expected to host huge parties with food and entertainment. “Everybody expects you to cook for them,” complains Rawali Bokuik, who is running for a seat in Port Moresby.
With voting driven by ethnicity and pork-barrel politics, national policy—indeed, policy of any kind—plays virtually no role. Every candidate promises to deliver better infrastructure, health care and education, but once in office will be expected to dole out favours and jobs to his wantok. Mr O’Neill has made this process more brazen with something called the District Services Improvement Programme, whereby every MP is able to allocate 10m kina ($3m) a year to projects in his district, with little oversight. Thus rather than one unified election on national themes, PNG in effect holds distinct, local elections for all 111 parliamentary seats. To add to the confusion, 3,332 candidates are running, an average of 30 a seat.
Trying to stitch together a coalition out of such diverse interests and obligations is like knitting with eels. Earlier this year Mr O’Neill’s People’s National Congress (PNC) party lost its main coalition partner, the National Alliance, after Mr O’Neill sacked its leader, who had accused the government of economic mismanagement. Mr O’Neill’s opponents smell blood. Mekere Morauta, a former prime minister, emerged from retirement to contest a seat in Port Moresby, calling Mr O’Neill’s government “an octopus with many tentacles, invading every crevice…where there is the smell of money”. Other heavyweights who command enough name recognition and following to form a government include Don Polye, a treasurer whom Mr O’Neill dismissed; Sam Basil, an opposition leader; and Gary Juffa, the firebrand governor of Oro Province.
Whoever emerges victorious will face the same headwinds. According the Asian Development Bank, growth plummeted from 13.3% in 2014 to just 2% last year, largely because of disappointing revenue from ExxonMobil’s massive liquefied-natural gas (LNG) project—the biggest private-sector investment in PNG’s history, which came online just as the international price of LNG began falling. Some economists argue that these statistics may understate the problem, and that the economy may in fact have contracted.
Either way, the government has struggled to meet its obligations. Earlier this year PNG lost its voting rights at the United Nations for failing to pay $180,000 in dues (the government blamed an administrative error). The country’s main electricity provider has cut power to several government agencies over unpaid bills. On the revenue side, the government may get some relief from rising commodity prices and additional LNG projects. One local economist says the government seems determined to “white-knuckle” it until then, perhaps bringing in some extra cash by hiking the sales tax, or taxing capital gains.
Despite its fiscal woes the government remains committed to hosting next year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit for the first time. A new “APEC Haus” is being built on reclaimed land in the centre of Port Moresby, irritating some locals who think the money could be better spent. In 2019 Bougainville, a large but poor island that long waged a separatist battle against PNG’s central government, will hold a referendum on independence; few would be surprised if it voted to secede. The tenure of the government to be formed in August is unlikely to be easy, whoever ends up leading it.
This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "Wantok and no action"
