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Abuses have also been committed by the wantoks whom corrupt politicians install in civil-service jobs. Morris Alaluku, from Milne Bay in eastern P.N.G., headed the national Lands department until he was replaced two years ago in what he terms a "political" move. He says he saw many cases where "heads of department were appointed at the minister's pleasure, and valuable lands were granted without proper procedures." When Madang lawyer Young Wadau worked for the Harbours Board in the mid '90s, "ministers would try to contract their own companies to build and manage wharves," he recalls. "Some tried to get the national stevedoring business for their wantoks." When Wadau objected, he says, "They threw me out."
The results of corruption are felt far from the capital. While the "money people" zip along the new highway between Port Moresby's government district and the airport, people in rural areas struggle over potholed tracks that only optimists would call roads. John Leahy is a Goroka businessman whose grandfathers were an Australian explorer and a village headman. At election time, he says, "politicians helicopter in to villages where the people have to carry their coffee to market and their sick to hospital on foot because the roads are gone." Outside big towns, power cuts are frequent, schools lack desks, hospitals are short of drugs, police cars have no fuel. The lack of funding for basic services, says Sir Anthony Siaguru, chairman of Transparency International P.N.G., "is directly related to corruption perpetrated by public servants and politicians pilfering from the public purse." Chef Gimbe is gloomy. "I feel it will get worse," he says. "If they try to fix the roads, it will take money from education. The government will never have enough money to fix everything."
In some places, only charity keeps things going. "People are going to local businesses and missions for money and services," says Leahy's wife Cynthia, who runs literacy programs for women, "because they haven't had anything from the government for so long." In the coastal town of Madang, hotelier Sir Peter Barter's Melanesian Foundation last year rebuilt two court houses after they collapsed. "The floors were rotten," he says. "There was nowhere to sit. You had to walk up a log to get inside."
Near the Parliament building in Port Moresby, a billboard proclaims a verse from the Book of Proverbs: "When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people suffer." Not far away, at the headquarters of the Catholic Bishops Conference of P.N.G., general secretary Lawrence Stephens is feeling the irony. "There are a lot of good people who are constantly fighting to get things done," he says, trying to coax his ceiling fan to life in one of the capital's regular brown-outs. "But others seem to feel there's no point trying to make the system work-we'll just make it look as if it's working."
The system should work. p.n.g. has a democratic constitution, a vigorous press, staunchly independent judges and a powerful ombudsman. Its leaders are probably no more venal than their counterparts in Washington or Canberra-after all, it wasn't Papua New Guineans who invented pork barreling or "jobs for the boys." But the cultural norms that help limit corruption in the developed world are new to P.N.G., where tribal societies had to put their own interests first or die. "In traditional village life," says Father Jan Czuba, a former anthropologist who is president of Madang's Divine Word University, "the mentality was, 'What is good for me and my clan is right. If I take something for my clan or myself, I am doing right.'"
When there was no way to store meat for tomorrow, it made sense to stuff yourself today. When survival depended on your wantoks' support, it made sense to keep them onside with gifts and favors. But the tenacity of these customs in modern P.N.G. has given rise to a shadow political system based on bribery and opportunism-one that undermines the constitutional system as surely as white ants eat away the stilts of a village house.
Politicians aren't the only players in this off-the-books game. Ordinary people must also take part-or risk losing their share of the pot. As a voter, says Transparency's Siaguru, "you want to try and get in as your M.P. someone living nearby or closely related to you, who is guaranteed to put you and yours before everyone else-apart from himself, of course." Fierce competition makes M.P.s vulnerable-half are turfed out after one five-year term-and many resort to bribing voters. "People don't care about experience, knowledge or the background of politicians," says chef Gimbe, "only whether they are close to them and can give them things and jobs."