The days of conspicuously cruel forced human labour, in the form of blackbirding and outright slavery, are for the most part long gone. However, the greed to exploit ignorant or passive human beings to do as much work as possible for a 'masta' of any skin colour in return for the least amount of money, is alive and well.
With respect to land, the days are gone where colonizers stole it outright from customary landowners, but again there's a new style around. It's called land grabbing and we've been seeing it in PNG where over 12% of PNG's customary land was lost to foreigners and ratbag national leaders in only about 5 years. The new, improved technique of stealing land (and resources)? It's the 99 year SABL leases.
Today we see a situation where around the world people in developing countries are labouring long and hard for low wages to produce cheap goods for people in developed countries who buy at the lowest price and consume with pleasure.
For most foreign investors PNG is little more than a source of cheap resources and agricultural ground. The problem is the labour. Compared to Indonesia, it's not cheap. We also have this tendency to speak our minds and be a bit uncooperative when we feel that we're being exploited. At least that's how educated people who have learnt the ways of the world react. People who are half educated or not educated at all are far more passive and a lot easier to manipulate. They're the easiest kinds of human beings to make into cheap sources of labour to do the hard menial work of the world.
Enter Peter O'Neill. Almost everything Peter has done is evidence of self-serving greed and the fanatic desire to cling onto power long after his use by date. He does deals with foreign businessmen, such as the still bizarre GE turbo power generators bought through Israeli middlemen when the government could have bought those generators directly from the GE manufacturer for less. PO's likely expectation are secret kickbacks coming his way.
Peter O'Neill has shown a very strange behaviour in regard to the land grabs called SABLs, which Belden Namah is currently in very hot water over. Soon after he became PM, O'Neill set up a commission to investigate SABLs. The Commission came back with the conclusion that most SABLs were land and timber grabbing scams that needed to be stopped. They advised many of the SABL agreements to be cancelled outright. And since then - 694 days to be exact - Peter O'Neill has only made superficial signs of doing anything of the kind. In reality, he has done nothing.
SABLS are a perfect vehicle for eventually enslaving rural people in PNG. Once SABLs deprive customary landowners of their land and resources, the now landless and desperate villagers will work for a lot less than they would have when they were proud landowners, rich in resources. Peter O'Neill can develop a population of near slaves by first allowing national (like Belden Namah) and foreign exploiters (like Rimbunan Hijau, owners of Vision City and The National newspaper) to take away our land, while at the same time developing our muscles but simultaneously keeping us as dumb and ignorant of the outside world as possible.
A wonderful way to achieve this objective is to spend lots of money on sports facilities rather than use any of that money to build libraries, classrooms, university science labs, and the like. Does that mean we're against sports? Of course not. Developing the body helps discipline the mind and that's where sports fit into education. But at the end of the day, we'd rather that our PNG minds have become disciplined through sports so that we can use our brains to be innovative and analytical. Using sports to discipline our brains to obediently do the work of masta once more isn't what we view as development and progress.
First things first. The government needs to get its priorities straight. First build the education infrastructure, and that means fully equipped classrooms, labs and libraries, not the hollow shells that Peter O'Neill has been building all over the nation. After we've got something to feed eager young minds with, then we can start worrying about the sports stadiums, fancy volleyball courts, and swimming pools.
Development is all about having proper priorities.