By Peter John Aitsi
Papua New Guinea, a Pacific nation of nearly six million that is rich in natural resources, shares an unfortunate reality with many developing countries: Because of corruption, the blessing of mineral and petroleum wealth does not guarantee prosperity.
For much of its 32 years since independence, Papua New Guinea has struggled to adequately meet the demand for essential services needed by the vast majority of its population. Governments, international partners and Papua New Guineans have acknowledged that corruption is behind much of the country's failure to deliver on the promise of social development. Corruption also is recognized as a direct hindrance to positive growth. As often documented in Papua New Guinea's local media, corruption does not only mean outright theft of money, but also abuse of power for personal gain or the mismanagement of affairs resulting in the breakdown in the delivery of public services.
The media regularly carries stories indicating that communities within Papua New Guinea blame their elected leaders' actions or lack of action for much of the corruption. In a 2006 public address, Grand Chief Paulias Matane, governor general of the country, shared his views that, unfortunately, in Papua New Guinea the word "leader" is now closely associated with the word "corruption." This view is given further credence by the public's perception that too much power is in the hands of the members of Parliament, in particular those leaders who hold ministerial positions or those who have some influence in the executive branch of government.
This imbalance of power in favor of the executive branch renders ineffective and demoralizes Papua New Guinea's public servants in most areas. And so with no real authority, the public servants are usually unable to provide qualified policy input or to provide checks and balances on the executive government.
To understand why and how this type of environment has been created, it is best to look at the cornerstone of democracy: the election process.
Papua New Guinea is a democracy. Its 109 members of Parliament are openly elected using a preferential system of voting, with each registered voter having the right to rank candidates in order of preference. Each parliament has a five-year term and serves under the Westminster system of government. PNG completed its last national election, its seventh since independence from the Australian administration, in 2007.
Elections early in Papua New Guinea's short history were relatively well organized and peaceful. In the last decade a worrying trend has developed within the electoral process, that of vote-buying or "cash for votes." Some commentators have called this phenomenon the single largest contributor to the embedding of corruption into political and public life.
Carol Kidu, a member of Parliament representing a district in Papua New Guinea's capital, Port Moresby, was re-elected to a third term in 2007. It has become increasingly evident to her that there is tremendous "public pressure" on candidates to provide food and other inducements to secure their votes, she said in an interview. This practice seems to have evolved from "one-off gifts" and ceremonial "feasts" to an expected, normative way of attracting votes.
Kidu said such vote-buying was not widespread in past elections, but her experience in 2007 suggested it had become more prevalent and that there usually was an expectation by voters that they would get something of value in exchange for their votes. She spoke of some candidates' establishing camps where voters were fed and housed together with the intention of having them "commit" to the candidate sponsoring the camp.
Reports of this type of campaigning were recorded as early as the 1980s, when the sitting member of one Highlands region airlifted many cartons of beer, placing them on an airstrip and calling on voters to come and get his or her share in return for a vote. To his surprise, the voters took the beer, but many voted for other candidates and he lost the election.
Of major concern is the ability of candidates, particularly incumbents or well-funded challengers, to influence elections by offering "cash for votes" and thus encouraging a culture of political patronage. This type of politics erodes the proper processes that should enhance good governance, as the winners often seek to recover funds spent during elections to repay supporters or sponsors.
However, of greater concern is the growing practice of using government-sanctioned mechanisms to "buy" votes. In October 2006, a move by the government to increase the level of Electoral Development Funds (EDF), commonly known as "slush funds," to members of Parliament from a level of 500,000 kina (US$173,325) to 1.5 million kina (US$519,975) drew widespread public outcry.
A group called Community Coalition Against Corruption prepared and circulated a public petition that was signed by more than 70,000 people over a three-week period. The petition resulted in a onetime proponent of the amendment removing the bill, and the EDF level remaining unchanged.
Joseph Ketan, an academic and commentator, stated clearly in a July 2007 policy paper that members of Parliament were using EDF money for "pork barrel" politics. Ketan titled his paper "The Use and Abuse of Electoral Development Funds and Their Impact on Electoral Politics and Government in Papua New Guinea." Such "handouts" from the state often were invested in personal networks to secure support for large-scale group enterprises, Ketan wrote. "Politicians relied on localized power bases to win elections and tended to devote much of the resources at their disposal to their strongholds, to the exclusion of the wider electorate."
And so in Papua New Guinea, an environment is developing that provides the government greater opportunities to be less transparent. If it is allowed to continue, vote-buying and "pork barrel" politics ultimately will remove the last hope of using the electoral process to hold elected leaders accountable.
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