2

Arrival

I spent a few happily humdrum days in Port Moresby before catching the 9 am flight to Buka, where my job would be based. The journey took less than two hours, the in-flight snack comprising two fondant chocolate biscuits and a little cup of orange juice. The plane landed shortly after midday. Coasting on our approach over an opalescent reef, we landed smoothly, and a red tractor with flashing lights directed the plane to the small terminal. ‘Please adjust your watches to Bougainville time,’ the pilot said, intoning words of welcome on the tannoy while we disembarked. The pilot’s reminder related to the job I was expected to do. As part of the Peace Agreement, Bougainville’s government was entitled to ‘draw down’ a number of governmental powers and functions,¹ and my job was to chivvy this process along. Thus far, one of the few powers they’d managed to draw down was the power to change the time zone. The Autonomous Region of Bougainville was one hour ahead of the rest of PNG and in the same time zone as neighbouring Solomon Islands. I adjusted my wind-up watch, but my iPhone did not automatically update; Digicel, the mobile phone company, had not yet changed its systems to reflect the new time zone. By then the ‘new’ time zone had been in place for more than five years.

The airport had altered little in the years since my last visit, and I remembered the old artillery gun from the Second World War near the perimeter, still pointing menacingly up into the sky as if waiting for a ghost Japanese kamikaze. The other new arrivals and I walked into a little tin-roofed waiting area separated from the rest of the terminal by a metal grille that reminded me of a church confessional. There we waited for our bags to be loaded onto a tractor trailer and dumped just outside the door, whereupon an almighty scramble ensued to be the first person to locate luggage, re-enter the waiting area and skedaddle out through another door. This fracas made me recall going to mass with my family in my childhood, and how my father could never understand why so many people would clamber and jostle in the queue for communion the moment the priest came down from the altar. He always made us wait until the end, and I adopted his sensible, measured approach in Buka, being the last person out of the terminal, where a security guard at the exit was ensuring that the baggage tags matched the receipt. Dressed in sandy combat fatigues, the guard appeared primed for desert warfare; his uniform bore the badge of the High Risk Security Company. Each time I passed in and out of this airport in the following years, I thought how peculiar it was for a business in the provision of security to characterise its services this way.

Standing beside a weathered old public information billboard warning about the dangers of AIDS, a woman named Maria and a driver called Willie were waiting for me outside. Both of them were local staff working on the program. Maria had a clipboard with one page on it, which, I could see, had lots of boxes on the right. ‘We are going to take you on a familiarisation drive of Buka and surroundings,’ she said, full of well-meaning officiousness. I had remembered Buka as small with a handful of streets. Perhaps it had expanded significantly in the few years since I’d been there?

After a thoroughgoing 15-minute tour, I knew for certain that the town had changed little. There was the port, and beside it the copra mill; a bakery; a couple of hotels; some second-hand clothing stores, and a bank with a hundreds-deep scrum of people waiting to use its two ATMs (automated teller machines). The largest structure in town was still the same: a bustling open-air market with a greying shingle roof, where Bougainvillean women sold their fruit and vegetables. The betel nut market still thrived beside it, and not far away was the boat stop for the trip over to the larger Bougainville island. We passed a petrol station, where fuel was being manually pumped into a car from one of several giant red drums, then past a patch of green the size of a soccer penalty-box with a bandstand to one side and stalls selling death-metal T-shirts. This was Bel Isi (‘Peace’) Park, and it was the smallest park I had ever seen. From there, we drove out of town for five minutes, past the airport, and Maria showed us the parliament and presidential offices. Neither had any cars parked beside them.

We drove past the government offices; Maria pointed to where I had worked in the past. ‘But no-one’s there now,’ she said, matter-of-factly. ‘Lunchtime. Come back around two-thirty.’ I ticked and initialled the 14 boxes on her clipboard, attesting that I had completed the grand tour, and was dropped at one of the town’s handful of hotel-restaurants, Reasons Bar & Grill.

As I walked up the wooden steps, I looked down and noticed a large pizza oven sitting in the corner below, presumably because it was too heavy to lug up the stairs. I was reminded of the ‘centre of excellence’. Upstairs, I met one of my new colleagues, an Australian lawyer called John, who both looked and dressed like Johnny Cash in his later years and carried the knowing air of the old island hand. I ordered fish soup, which came with little finger slices of buttered bread. Our table looked out onto the waterway of the Buka passage, where motorised banana boats were scooting back and forth, while wooden canoes followed the direction of the tide. John had googled me, so he knew I’d been in Timor-Leste. ‘Never been there, always wanted to go, and I’d imagined Bougainville would be like that when I came here: a place where an energetic nation-building project would be underway. I wasn’t expecting it to be as slow as it is.’ I inquired about the ‘drawdown of powers’ process that, as per my job description, was being prioritised. The process had stalled somewhat. In the time between the job advertisement and my interview, the chief secretary, who was head of the public service, had been suspended on charges of financial chicanery, and a temporary incumbent was in place who was spending a lot of his time away in Port Moresby. (Both men would ultimately be dismissed from their posts.)

John dropped me at the project office, located on the second floor of a building that housed the Department of Treasury and Finance, which, when I arrived, had a total of two people inside. The project office upstairs was a much more crowded affair, 20 or so people jammed together, hunched over laptops. A few expatriates sat among this crowd, but most of the staff were either from Bougainville or elsewhere in PNG.

It all felt very first-day-at-school, but, improbably, it was my mentioning I’d come from Zimbabwe that broke the awkwardness. ‘Do Zimbabweans love telling Mugabe jokes, too?’ one asked. What? It turned out the old tyrant had quite a following here, courtesy of oddball sayings (mistakenly) attributed to him, shared, liked and commented upon through social media. The memes presented Mugabe as a lovable old rascal with a capacity for knowing asides and sly humour, a characterisation that would have surprised many of the 14 million Zimbabweans labouring under his ‘kakistocracy’ – a word I learned in Harare to describe the rule of the most venal and incompetent.

I talked about the time we met the old leader and how distinctly non-gregarious but fascinating he was. We met at State House in Harare, once home to the colonial governors, where we had gone so that Suzanne could present her diplomatic credentials. On the walls were pastoral scenes of fox-hunting and hounds in English dales, and on the tables, tea and oozing cream puffs were served on Wedgewood china. Mugabe didn’t want to talk politics or opine on the dismal state of his country; he wanted to palaver about the cricket, recite poetry and moan about how Australia was denying him an entry visa. What surprised me most about Zimbabwe was how much this country reminded me of an England of long ago. I’d gone expecting revolutionary fervency and instead found a colonial time capsule, a state that seemed to exist purely for the purposes of aggrandising the people in charge. ‘Zimbabwe sounds a bit like Papua New Guinea,’ said a man who introduced himself as George. ‘We’ve kept so much of the old Australia here, too,’ he said. I’d never really thought about that before – but he was right.

George was from Central Province in PNG, a man in his sixties with a scrum half’s build, a thick mop of black hair and a pair of bifocal glasses. He was to become one of my closest and dearest friends. A former public servant in Port Moresby, he was now a ‘Human Resources’ adviser to the Bougainville government. There were 10–15 such advisers working within the government who rotated in and out; my arrival meant there was now another. The advisory model is a ubiquitous feature of many development projects. Every year a quarter of international aid – approximately US$15 billion globally – is spent on capacity development.²

The theory is nearly as old as the hills, and it goes like this: parts of government (and the individuals forming it) lack the capacity required to discharge responsibilities effectively and require ‘capacity building’ to be able to do so. The role of the adviser is to serve as a cross between motivational coach, knowledgeable professor, repository of ideas, modeler of appropriate bureaucratic behaviour and shoulder to cry on. It is one of the omnipresent features of aid delivery, but as yet no agreed coherent, effective way to monitor and evaluate it has been developed to determine whether it does any good at all. The role of adviser attracts all kinds of different people and groups, each invested in evangelising the people they visit in the different approaches they think might be effective. Yet, various incentives are at play that cloud the formation of objective judgement: the donors who pay for the work are skittish about generating newspaper headlines, and the individuals who work as advisers have multiple, mixed incentives, as do the people they are working with. I’ve worked with some brilliant technical advisers and those at the at the other end of the spectrum.

A huge library of material³ – I have contributed to it myself with my numerous windy reports – has been built up, in an attempt to winkle out and explicate what advisers do, for the purpose of assigning some measurable value to that work.⁴ Part of the problem is that technical advisers are visible – especially in Bougainville, where my skin differs so evidently in colour from the burnished black skin of many around me – but what they try to accomplish is not. Advice and ideas cannot be seen. Advising can support. It can facilitate. It can try to spark. By its very nature, however, it produces nothing on its own that can be sustainable. It can only stand a chance of being effective when paired with something else, just as a matchstick requires a striking strip, a coffee needs a cup, or the door to my office needed a key.

Moreover, as in any form of relationship, success depends upon the willingness and levels of interest of the people involved, and their incentives. If people are not interested, or simply regard showing up to work as a means of acquiring a salary – a most understandable goal in a place with such high levels of unemployment – there really is not much one can do. Yet, in my experiences in international development, writing about issues of interest and levels of engagement was off-limits. That was a topic for after-work drinks, or ventilation on messaging platforms, but not for the official record. Another taboo issue was the extent to which the adviser was expected to advise on an issue at a remove from the issue itself, or even do the job themselves, a head-in-the-sand approach given that people from all over the world travel to fill positions that cannot be filled from within the place itself. It was strictly forbidden to talk about the political setting in which such work was taking place and whether such ‘reforms’ were desired in the first place.

‘How many people work in the Bougainville government?’ I asked George. The population of the place was reckoned to be 200–300,000. ‘Not counting the health employees, about 500,’ was the answer. That was a very small number to do all the tasks expected of them, I remember thinking. It was time to call it a day, and I went out the door with George to our shared accommodation, located on Sohano, a little island between Buka and Bougainville islands and only a two-minute ride away by motorised banana boat. My new home could not have been any more removed from the palatial old Dutch colonial house in Harare with our retinue of domestic staff and security guards manning the gates – although this little place also had a storied history. Sohano had been the home of German and Australian administrators, whose houses, I was told, had been located near where my home was now. Until 10 years earlier, my room had been part of a small hotel. The writer Michael Moran writes evocatively of his stay here in the early 2000s, with war photographs affixed to the walls and a vase of knitted flowers on the serving table.⁵ There was little of this faded glory now. When I was there it carried the air of a partitioned flophouse. There was a table, a TV with a satellite box showing BBC news and 30 Indonesian cable channels, a rattan chair and a squeaky bed. I was taking over the room of my predecessor, and her predecessor before that. I felt like the latest in a long conveyor belt of personnel.

---