Epilogue

I returned to Port Moresby a few months later for what I didn’t know then was the last week BC (Before COVID). I had a few days’ work to finish, and when that was done I spent a few days going through the archives at Papua New Guinea’s National Library. The library was one of the independence gifts from Australia in 1975, the era reflected in its decor and brutalist architectural style. The noticeboards were made of red felt, the signage was old-fashioned, and the building’s interior corners were shrouded in demi-darkness. This was a functioning and well-frequented library, albeit a poorly resourced one. Not many books seemed to have been purchased in the last 20 years. Most patrons were writing notes in jotters; a couple of people were working on laptops. Only one person was playing with their phone. I spent happy days reading old copies of the Arawa Bulletin and some old government documents.

Naturally, I was staying at the Holiday Inn, and, naturally, there was another hefty delegation from Bougainville staying there also. They were in town for a meeting of the JSB, and the primary agenda item they were pushing seemed abstruse in nature: to change the name of the JSB to ‘Joint Consultative Body’. There seemed to be no urgency to progress the actual results of the referendum. By contrast, three months after a similar referendum in the then Indonesian-occupied province of East Timor, the Indonesians had left, and a United Nations administration was in charge of administering the territory.¹ (This is far from a perfect comparison; the Indonesians laid waste to Dili and other parts of the country before they left. No violence occurred after Bougainville’s referendum.)

As per the Peace Agreement, the two parties were meant to ‘consult’ on the referendum result, with the outcome of that consultation going to the parliament of PNG for final decision-making. No such consultation had begun. I ran into Joseph Watawi at the little shop inside the Inn, where he was buying phone credit and getting his change in packets of chewing gum. He had backflipped since we’d last seen each other; he’d joined the government and was now its minister for economic development. Joseph rattled off the policies he was going to enact: tax reform, support for small and medium enterprises, improved access to credit. ‘I have told my technical officers to stop sleeping and get to work,’ he said. I did not know then, but it was the last time I would see him.

As it turned out, there would be no ‘work’ for Joseph’s staff to get back to. In response to curtailing the spread of COVID-19, the government shut down about a week later. All but a few of the expatriates and national advisers had been evacuated and the daily flight from Moresby cancelled. The island was effectively independent, cut off (apart from mobile phone signals) from the outside world. The government in Port Moresby gave the government in Buka some money to support its efforts to thwart COVID, which parliamentarians allocated to their own campaigning, with no hint of irony for ‘awareness’, when, presumably, a large gathering could itself be a potential superspreader event.

The election for the new Bougainville legislature and president began in late August 2020, with counting beginning in the middle of September. Results were being sent to my phone by the minute. The elections were well-organised; the count staff worked well past 4:06 without complaint. The reason for this dedication was not that Bougainvilleans were somehow better at organising elections than other things: it was the fact that everyone had an interest in the outcome. I wondered how could such enthusiasm, commitment and skill be bottled for the everyday work of government.

Many of my friends were vying for seats. Eddie ran in his constituency and fell short, as did Dennis in his, coming a close second. Joseph was defeated by a medical doctor.

There was a wide field of runners and riders aiming to be president, including ex-combatants, some of the bureaucrats who had been turfed out of office for financial chicanery, a former minister and owner of the Oasis nightclub, the former speaker of the parliament, a sports administrator, a rocket scientist, and even the man from the psychedelic presentation about the Strategic Development Plan. (He had been appointed acting chief secretary after Nobetau’s dismissal.) All ran on effectively the same platform: that they were the one person who was best positioned to deliver on the referendum result. No-one mentioned the Strategic Development Plan.

Emerging victorious was Ishmael Toroama, a former leader of the BRA, signatory to the Peace Agreement and prominent in ‘a wide variety of fields of endeavour’, including ‘weapons disposal, business, music, church’.²

There is no doubting the sincerity of this man in his desire to lead his people to independence. Negotiations with PNG are proceeding, slowly, with a commitment to determining a political settlement between 2025 and 2027.

Profound structural issues with the public service remain, leaving wide open the question as to who is going to do the practical work to fill in the detail of this new settlement: developing the position papers, working on the exposure drafts, and overseeing the grinding, frequently dull, fiendishly complex and eminently necessary minutiae of bureaucracy, policy and law. The question of ‘who’ is often overlooked. Few bureaucrats anywhere in the world could straightforwardly take on the challenge of negotiating new governmental arrangements for a new state, and that includes the public servants of Buka and Port Moresby. In 2022, Joseph Mona, Bougainville’s minister for public service, lamented ingrained work practices. The Post Courier quoted him thus: ‘In the ABG public service, we start work late and knock off early, putting in only 25 hours a week at most.’ Mona questioned ‘how the nation will be able to achieve its dreams of becoming an independent nation when we are at our lowest levels in terms of our performance’.³ Former chief secretary Nobetau wrote in 2022: ‘The challenge is to now migrate from a mindset of aspiration to one of implementation.’⁴

It seems obvious that some external support will be required, but the question is whether, in terms of realpolitik, other states will want to lend a hand.

Tied to this question is the issue of what the terms of any settlement should look like, and how it would be prepared. It was a scenario I’d try to run bureaucrats through a number of times when I worked there:

OK, you’re now negotiating after the result. You get flown to Port Moresby, put up in the Holiday Inn and have to start negotiating the next day. What do you ask for first? In the case of Brexit, the UK negotiators focused on fisheries, trade deals and borders during their talks with the Europeans. What about Bougainville?

It was always hard to get a concrete answer; I’d hear phrases like ‘transitional arrangements’ and ‘sign a treaty’, but it was difficult to get into specifics. I’ve often wondered why it was so hard to descend into details. Was it that Bougainville had never had to think about anything like this in the past? Was it their lack of exposure to other functioning government models? Was this not the way they would go about decision-making in their own society? Finding answers to these questions will be important if the Bougainvilleans are to forge the type of detailed separation agreement that they aspire to in their negotiations.

There are many potential starting points for consultations. Here are a few:

• agreeing on the additional governmental powers and functions that will or could be transferred to Bougainville, along with a timeline for transfer and a budget for their cost
• determining what support the Bougainville government will need to enable it to exercise its responsibilities effectively
• working out financial arrangements between Bougainville and PNG
• animating hitherto dormant provisions of the Peace Agreement pertaining to revenue-sharing for fisheries.

It needs to be clear that there is no right or wrong place to start – and that it is all going to be technical in nature. What matters most is to start somewhere.

In the first year of its tenure, the Toroama government’s main problem was something that it could not negotiate or sign an MoU with: a roiling COVID-19 virus that ripped through this would-be nation. The whole of PNG managed to dodge the worst of COVID in 2020, only to be clobbered with a vengeance in 2021. It pains me that many of the people I worked with during my time here and have referenced in this book are now to be referred to in the past tense. John Tabinaman, the lands minister, passed away, as did other senior Bougainvillean leaders, including former vice-president Raymond Masono, whose Master’s thesis I had found in my office some years earlier. Joseph Watawi died in Buka hospital in November 2021. We had been messaging each other regularly; I’d tell him about my move to the United States, and he’d reply that he intended to come to Washington to make the case for Bougainville independence. Sadly, he never will.

Donor support continues, but with a different twist on the recipe used in the past. The present Australian iteration comes with a significant reduction in advisory support, with attention tilted more to the support of organisations in Bougainville that provide practical assistance. The position I held was discontinued. More broadly, the debate on the value of technical assistance continues. It remains an impossible task to define. It would be more realistic to adopt the brukim bus strategy, accepting that this will be long-term drudgery, in which there will be much sitting around, much everyday frustration, and occasional frenetic bouts of activity and accomplishment. We need to find a better vocabulary to define and explain this sort of long-haul, much-needed, foundational but unheralded work.

For now, this would-be nation, this unsung land, remains in limbo between where it is and where its voters want it to be. Is this place ready for independence? I’ll answer the question by asking another: was any country ready for independence when it gained it? Some countries in the Pacific (and, indeed, elsewhere in the world) became independent not because they passed some form of competence test or aptitude test, but because the colonial powers that once ruled them decided, on their terms, that it was time for them to go. Bougainville has a harder challenge than states that became independent in the colonial sunset. It will have to prove it is ready more than others did, notwithstanding that most individual Bougainvilleans are independent people already, both in their willingness to be responsible for their lives and in their spirit.

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