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Aid comes to my aid

Many tales of people who came to be in PNG for long stints begin with a tale of flight. This, was how I, too, found myself in Bougainville, although my story is not as romantic, radical or tragic as the stories of some who came to these islands before me. I hadn’t fathered a child with someone I shouldn’t; I wasn’t fleeing the long arm of tax authorities or judgement by a bankruptcy court. I hadn’t come to find Utopia, as had the German August Engelhardt¹ and his followers, cocovores who lived (and died) solely on coconuts just before the Great War; or the hundreds of French, Belgian and Spanish colonists induced by the Marquis de Rays² to move from Europe to ‘La Nouvelle France’, a new empire he created on a malarial coast. I wasn’t like Errol Flynn,³ who came seeking a fortune. Nor was I discovered there by a Hollywood talent scout while brawling with a crocodile, as he was. But I was fleeing all the same.

I arrived via the most unusual route: the Republic of Zimbabwe. My wife Suzanne – I love her with all my heart – is a diplomat, and we moved there for her job. It quickly turned into a disaster. We hadn’t thought too hard about the decision before going there. It sounded like a great family adventure, and some previous leaps in the dark, such as moving on a whim to Timor-Leste, had worked out spectacularly well. That was where we met, and without that place, without taking that chance, we would never have found each other and created two wonderful sons, Charles and Patrick. However, I was totally unprepared for what I encountered in Harare. Being a ‘plus one’ in a privileged cocoon inside an impoverished and unhappy country was unquestionably the hardest job I have ever had. Hardest of all was that my role meant I felt obliged to keep what in Papua New Guinean pidgin (Tok Pisin) is called ‘pasim maus’, a shut mouth, which is something I’ve never been very good at. For many of the people we met in the diplomatic bubble, the conventions of the profession meant inoculation against speaking what was plainly obvious to anyone who could see what was right in front of them. The state was a venal, inept and occasionally murderous racket,⁴ but conventions of diplomacy meant that for plenipotentiaries of other states, what mattered most was to forge relationships with the people within it. One ambassador was particularly one-eyed, discerning winds of change in a place where the air did not circulate. I was frustrated, bored, crabby, at endless loose ends, and after a few months the only thing lowering faster than my golf handicap was my sense of self-worth. I saw clearly then why some of the spouses I’d met in both Dili and various diplomatic outposts across the Pacific looked permanently frayed and unhappy. Another diplomatic family left hastily; the rumour went around that the desolate spouse had threatened the chef with a carving knife.

Then a solution seemed to present itself – a job advertisement for a position in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, which was possibly as far from Zimbabwe as one could imagine. The preamble to the job description was enticing, written with an urgent and dignified tone:

The Bougainville Peace Agreement, and various associated Constitutional and Organic laws, commit the two Governments to cooperate towards implementing autonomy arrangements. Specifically, the legal framework provides for a transfer of listed functions and powers to the ABG, in close collaboration with the National Government, to ensure the ABG has sufficient capacity, assets and finance to implement the transferred powers and functions.

Recent Joint Supervisory Board meetings have agreed [on] the need for a more proactive approach to [the] transfer of powers, including the establishment of a proposed overarching Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Governments. The MoU elaborates the draw-down process and obligations of each government. It is intended to facilitate accelerated draw-down and closer intergovernmental cooperation.⁵

The role entailed helping to nudge this process along. The job formed part of a program of Australian support, and the successful candidate, if the job description was to be read at face value, would be helming important and innovative work. It sounded more alluring than another round of golf and seemed the perfect opportunity to deploy experiences of doing something similar in previous jobs and academic research.

I knew the place, to an extent. I’d been to Bougainville a couple of times for short stints, the last of these in 2012, when I had conducted a review of a community policing program.⁶

On that occasion, my fellow consultant and I had spent a few days in the tumbledown administrative capital, Buka, and my memory was of how small but how fabulously adorned in titles the government had seemed, and how sparsely peopled. Now, the only person in the office of the president was the leader himself.

The president was John Momis, a storied figure in the political history of both Bougainville and PNG, a personification of its intertwinements and frays. He was born in 1942 to a father from an ‘important chiefly clan’⁷ in Buin, in Bougainville’s south, and a mother of Chinese and New Ireland descent. His father’s cousin was Papala, an opponent of the German colonial powers that once ruled Bougainville. In Momis’s own words, penned in a chapter of a book about Bougainville prior to the conflict, Papala:

ordered his soldiers to kill the paramount luluai [administration-appointed local chief], policemen and catechist … because he saw them as agents of the foreign powers seeking to impose their authority with its corruptive influences.⁸

Momis had similar goals to those of his forefather – self-determination for both the individual and the nation – but took a diametrically different path, one that was shaped by, among other things, Catholic social teaching and his study of the experiences of Martin Luther King Jr. A seminarian and ordained priest, he went into politics and joined fellow young Papua New Guinean leaders seeking to unshackle themselves from Australian colonial rule. Elected as a member for Bougainville, he led the Constitutional Planning Commission between 1972 and 1974 that helped write Papua New Guinea’s constitution, resigning shortly before independence was due to be granted in 1975 on the grounds that Bougainville was not receiving a fair allocation of responsibilities and revenue within the new state. He co-signed a petition to the United Nations to lobby against the granting of Papua New Guinea’s independence before the status of Bougainville was resolved and travelled to New York to make the case, the journey paid out of a pool of monies collected throughout Bougainville. ‘Should the United Nations fail to properly discharge its duties of protecting our interests, we will be left with no alternative but to secede unilaterally from Papua New Guinea,’⁹ he wrote in a letter, giving his address as c/o the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. They left empty-handed. A year later Momis forged a compromise arrangement whereby Bougainville would receive provincial autonomy within the newly independent state of Papua New Guinea.

Momis went on to occupy many of the high offices of state. He was responsible for decentralisation and was Papua New Guinea’s ambassador to China. He has an honorary doctorate from The Papua New Guinea University of Technology. Momis was a negotiator and co-signatory of the Bougainville Peace Agreement in 2001 and was elected president of the region in 2010. On the day we met him, he was wearing an unprepossessing beige safari suit suggestive of his radical beginnings.

The very thinly peopled office seemed an apt metaphor for the state of Bougainville. Architects – Momis among them – had helped fashion the structures, but there was still much work to be done to animate them.

Most of our time on this 2012 visit was spent outside Buka, on the eponymous island of Bougainville. We’d juddered our way on scrabbled dust roads in a Land Cruiser driven by an ex-combatant from the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA)¹⁰ called Lowell, a man with a musculature so cut that he could have won a body-building competition. As a young man, Lowell had fought in the 1988–97 conflict¹¹ – what people referred to as ‘the Crisis’ – and now was working as a PMV driver, the abbreviation standing for ‘public motor vehicle’, a shared taxi that shuttled passengers between the old capital of Arawa and Kokopau, a sprawling town at the tip of the main island of Bougainville. From there it was a short boat ride over to Buka. In church halls we interviewed anyone we could get our hands on, resting on wooden benches shaded under the boughs of large trees.

My abiding memory of the visit was how so many people we met had metabolised fully all the high modernist syntax and argot of governance and aid: they spoke about frameworks, modalities, projects, crosscutting issues and technical teams as fluently as any consultant. In a police station in Buin, a town in the south of Bougainville, the cellophane remained intact on leather chairs and desks more than 10 years after they had been delivered, giving the station the feel of a beached Mary Celeste. Australia had delivered the office equipment in advance of a deployment of its Federal Police, who, because of a legal dispute, were never to come.¹²

Inside the station a police officer told us that he needed ‘training’. ‘Training in what?’ we asked him. ‘Training in capacity building,’ he replied, plucking effortlessly another term from the development lexicon. Ideally in Port Moresby. Preferably at a hotel. Lasting for at least a week; a fortnight would be even better. He didn’t appear too vexed as to what the training would be about, or its value; he simply wanted to get away for a little bit. I admired his candour.

In Port Moresby on the way out, we met first with some junior diplomats funding the trip to brief them on our findings. ‘Something must be done,’ one thundered, and maybe then I might have believed her. After that, we went to meet the director of the National Coordination Office for Bougainville Affairs (NCOBA) in Port Moresby, the office of the PNG government responsible for synchronising government support to the region. It was a funereally quiet place the day we visited. The workforce consisted of a few people staring into space; someone was playing solitaire on his old computer.

A senior official nodded vigorously as we recited our earnest findings and suggested that we call a ‘strategy meeting’ to discuss the issue further – in Honiara, capital of nearby Solomon Islands – and preferably in a nice hotel. For at least a week, but a fortnight would be better.

In the years since that trip, I had returned reasonably often to Port Moresby, writing technical reports for various arms of aid programs: plans, reviews, designs. Aid is a wordy business, and I felt betimes like a railway stoker, shovelling words into the bureaucratic furnace to keep it chugging to the next station. Of an evening at the Holiday Inn, a hotel popular with the development set, I’d share drinks with expatriate government advisers making light work of the house red and speaking about what I was semaphoring in all my reports as a ‘challenging delivery context’. Their nightly shoptalk was absenteeism in offices, intermittent electricity supply, workshops unfailingly starting a few hours late, passive resistance and the resigned resentments encountered daily.

There was a timeless and familiar quality to such grievances. The academic literature about government in Melanesia¹³ makes for miserable reading: it portrays the organisations we were working with as slapdash, pedantic, dilatory and inattentive. Writing in 2006, the historian Hank Nelson observed:

Given the inability of many government departments and agencies to carry out basic functions – such as keep files on employees and pay and promote them – there is not much point expecting them to implement [anything] major.¹⁴

A few years later, Mark Turner and David Kavanamur wrote about the bureaucracy’s ‘incremental decay rendering it inappropriate for the tasks it is supposed to perform’.¹⁵ The US government, in a cable leaked by Wikileaks, characterised the government of PNG as a ‘dysfunctional blob’.¹⁶ After his visits to PNG, Francis Fukuyama put it this way: ‘For any given reform, donors have to be realistic about their potential leverage and work within the constraints given by the political system.’ He went on to say that ‘the political context cannot be abolished or wished away’.¹⁷ The trouble, of course, is that admitting to such problems is difficult for the donors who support all this activity, and hard for scribes like me to put into the official record without getting thwacked. This may well explain why there is a growing turn in the literature – both aid memoir and academic writing – to peer behind the bureaucratic curtain, reflect on challenges and state more baldly the structural, political and practical challenges of implementation. Often these books are written as narrative. This book fits within this literature.¹⁸

The genre of reports on development projects offered no reward for producing a draft with a well-turned phrase, vivid character portrait or punchy sentence. I learned my lessons the hard way during this time, when a draft was returned to me with the comment that it read like an article from Newsweek. In my naivety, I initially thought the remark was intended as high praise. Few were interested in recitations of more complex, nuanced and human truths, such as the long shadows of colonialism or a political system focused on resource acquisition for the clan or tribe. The officials administering the aid would admit as much after turning around to check the coast was clear, but publicly querying the efficacy of these efforts was a step too far. There was the occasional bit of mordant humour to be had, such as when I found a giant oven outside the side entrance to the ‘Centre of Excellence’ of the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary; whoever had ordered it some years earlier had not measured its dimensions against those of the narrow door it needed to fit through, and now it was serving as a makeshift cupboard. The oven reminded me of a line from Shelley’s poem Ozymandias: ‘Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’¹⁹ For the most part, this was trying work that I took on largely because doing it bought me the time I needed to finish my book on Timor-Leste.²⁰

Hence, when we left for Zimbabwe, the last thing on my mind was a return to Bougainville, PNG, or even the aid business, but a year of kicking my heels caused a volte-face. Suddenly, the profession I had been happy to get shot of seemed deeply alluring. I was surprised at the extent to which the job description was brimming with vim but prepared to suspend incredulity if it aided the cause of getting me out of here. I applied for the job, was interviewed, shouted my answers down a rickety phone connection and was as surprised as all get-out to find I was successful. I told the spouse of the British ambassador that I was going to PNG. He heard the ‘N’ as ‘and’ and wished me well in my position with the pharmaceutical company Proctor and Gamble.

So, just after Christmas, I found myself on a flight path from Harare to Johannesburg to Sydney to Port Moresby. I was put in the old Holiday Inn for a few days, where little seemed to have changed in the intervening years, not even the menu. The beef rendang was still spiceless and the red wine as lukewarm as it used to be. Running machines at the broiling gym continued to test agility and dexterity by switching off without warning, and the worn sign that proclaimed, ‘New equipment coming soon’ had been there since that first visit in 2012. There was still a dedicated line item for safari suits on the laundry list. The stories in the two daily newspapers – the Post Courier and The National – were facsimiles of those published years before: police chiefs were finger-wagging about the need for law and order, while political leaders were making thundering announcements or launching new fix-it-all schemes. A page in both newspapers was dedicated to Bougainville, and the stories were similar: eulogies to training programs recently finished, paeans to corporate plans, and announcements that new gender and social inclusion strategies were being launched. Of the commitment to draw down governmental powers post-haste²¹ that was the basis of my ostensible job there was no mention.

I called in at the NCOBA office, which was now in a different location, adjacent to a Chinese seafood restaurant a block away from the city’s brewery. I remember Suzanne calling me as I arrived, and my telling her where I was. I spoke about the role of the office. ‘Oh, that sounds very grand,’ she said. I switched the call into video mode to show the scene before me: a large meeting room, three quarters of which was filled with a table of walnut veneer and no-one sitting on the well-appointed leather chairs. The office pinboard was filled with clippings heralding historical signing ceremonies and commitments to ‘work around the clock’ for peace. There was a new director in charge, but I could not detect a lot of energy in the office this time around, either. I recognised the solitaire player from years earlier, mesmerised this time by the blue-fringed page of Facebook. I was expecting to be grilled about my plans for the job, but there were no such questions; the director asked for an upgrade to the office internet on the grounds that this would improve productivity. I uttered something non-committal; his request brought to my mind earlier times when every application to an aid donor in Timor-Leste included a line item for a sound system. Why couldn’t we just admit that one reason why the aid program we were part of was smiled at and tolerated was that one might get lucky on an equipment tombola?

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