| Subject: Proud to be Papua New Guinean - |
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anon
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Date Posted: 15:26:10 12/15/04 Wed
Proud to be Papua New Guinean - Post and Cut National News Paper
AS the years pass, we become an increasingly complex and diversified race of people.
It’s a matter of habit for us, and for those who observe us from afar, to see Papua New Guinea as a nation of rural subsistence dwellers, backed up by a small proportion of our people living in a handful of urban areas.
That picture remains superficially true, but only superficially.
The urban mix of 2004 bears precious little resemblance to that of 25 years ago. Then those who lived in our cities and towns were overwhelmingly employed by government or by government-controlled agencies.
Only a relative handful had employment with private enterprise, which was still dominated by foreigners.
Secondary education was a privilege enjoyed by a minority, while our tertiary education structures were in their infancy.
Secondary education today still only reaches a minority, and those with a university education remain little more than a national footnote.
But look at what those secondary and tertiary students now do when they leave their educational institutions.
PNG doctors, engineers, architects, lawyers, pilots and ship’s captains have become commonplace within our society.
Women engineers are no longer a curiosity, and neither are women bulldozer drivers. Twenty-five years ago, most women who battled their way through secondary education either continued their fight by entering university, or by joining private enterprise.
If they went into the employment sector, the chances were that they joined the retail trade, became air hostesses, or entered the public service as secretaries.
Today’s women face far fewer restrictions.
Women professionals are widely accepted — teachers, doctors, specialist nurses, lawyers, and bankers feature strongly in the list.
As for the men, increasing numbers now work at the top levels of large companies in PNG, in fields such as law, mining and resources, agriculture, and marine resources.
We have much-celebrated international pilots, specialist doctors and outstanding jurists working in a number of overseas countries, and Papua New Guineans can be found studying at universities around the world.
Too often, we bemoan our national status.
The depressing litany of facts and figures that attest to our malnutrition ranking, our HIV/AIDS figures, our quality of life, our per head income, our sporting status and a host of other yardsticks tend to obscure the reality of our progress.
This is a country on its way, one that will count for a great deal, and whose people will contribute much in the generations ahead.
But we have a few national habits that are counter-productive.
We should long ago have stopped being forever on the defensive.
We are not the poorest of the poor. We do not have the world’s lowest levels of education.
There is almost no real poverty, by world standards, in our country.
We have a freely elected parliament that represents every citizen, male or female.
Our education system, faced with the near-impossibility of catering for a burgeoning birth rate of 2.6 percent increase annually, battles on manfully, and overall, successfully.
Our health services are improving, and on a national scale.
We need to accept that we cannot create Utopia, or Nirvana, or Paradise overnight.
Carving a nation from a lump of unshaped potential is a skilled, time-demanding and arduous task.
We need to recognise that less than thirty years is nowhere near long enough for the completion of the magnificent creation that will one day emerge.
We need, as 2004 limps to an end, to re-generate our pride in being Papua New Guineans.
Not every idea that streaks onto the PNG shore from overseas is gilded with genius. Other nations may well have their own ways of achieving their goals, but that does not necessarily make those methods either desirable or acceptable in PNG.
And we need to be able, free of arrogance, false nationalism and misplaced conceit, to be able to say so, and say it with conviction.
We need, above all else, to believe in our own future and in our own role in creating that future.
Slowly but increasingly certainly, PNG is rejoining its global peers.
And if we can make a personal commitment to our country and our future, the rate of that progress will markedly accelerate.
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