PNG NATIONAL GENERAL ELECTIONS 2022 - THE DAY OF RECKONING HAS ARRIVED

 

The National Parliament of Papua New Guinea.

IT’S COMING, IT'S HERE AND TODAY IS THE LAST DAY!

WINGTI - PREDICTED to retain his seat as Western Highlands Governor.

It’s that pencil stub end of the grubby silly season. Excitement, promotions, predictions, maybe a glassman prophecy or two are coming to pass today.

In the true spirit of PNG politics, the gritty pain, sweaty gain, stressful strain and witty brains of political will, political muscle, political leverage, which were in full swing the last month, end today.

As has always been the suited case, parties are mushrooming, candidates are already contending and promises are blossoming. Who are we going to believe?

The women vote has been discussed, the women leadership has been leveraged and the women have been censured. 

Give our women a fair and free fighting chance!

The politicking among the wannabe big shots men kicked off well before Covid arrived as a candidate. 

We are headed for the BALLOT BOXES next Monday, July 4. 

Three short sleepless days. 

Experience shows that before, during and after vote syndromes are always the same.

Will the ever-growing number of unemployed and restive youths get their voice heard? What about our ever so marginalized people living with a disability?

Coupled with Covid-19 and one day polling, despite all the assurances from the PNG Electoral Commission, and guarantees of funding and logistics for NGE 2022, we would be foolish not to offer hopes of everything will go according to 1, 2 and 3.

A promise of using NID for electronic voting has been just that – another empty election promise 10 years ago.

The threat of guns and violence is fearful. Selling of votes, double even triple voting, stolen ballot boxes or even burnt ballots is real as climate change. 

These are some of the frightening scenarios we have experienced and lived through.

In the last 20 years, elections and electioneering has grown into a once in a 5-years industry that has its own rules, its hidden power players and its winners and grinners and ‘dinaus’. 

We have to agree that every result since has had some tinge of omission in its course.

With no National Population Census to guide our polling eligibility in each ward, LLG and district, how will census managers disagree to agree on disagreements? 

Without updated common rolls, the figures can get really murky.

Now the regulators of the elections are saying if you are a convicted criminal, you are ineligible as a candidate. 

What about his or her voting rights? Will that pinky be inked?

In the last NGE 2017, and five years earlier in 2012, the independent observers crunched their observations in a report published by the Australian National University.

All manner of discrepancies were discovered and discussed even to the ends of the earth with alleged use of sorcery and the famous PNG magic invention ‘glassman’ to bait a boxful of votes.

Glassman and glass meri have been outlawed by the very Parliament every man and his dog is aiming for so who we going to call? 

Definitely not the ghost busters!

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