Cabinets of mendacious curiosities

“THE DEAL IS FLAWED”…. “NO, ITS OKAY”… ” IT WAS RUSHED”! Flawed, okay and rushed are the three kinds of adjectival phrases that captioned front-page news about a recent deal cut between companies and the Government of PNG to develop liquified natural gas (LNG) in the country. The development of LNG project is organised with a consortium of companies and the government. The original agreement underlying the terms of the cosortium was signed 3 months ago on the 23rd of May. The Government of PNG was represented by its Head of State, Sir Paulias Matane, the Minister for Petroleum, Hon. William Duma while the joint venture participants came from Exxon Mobil, Oil Search, Santos, Nippon Oil, MRDC and Eda Oil.

The original news article in May mentioned that the agreement was sealed with a K38 billion financial package to kick start the project which would run for the next 40-50 years. However, a recent article in the Post Courier subtracted K8 billion from the figure originally provided by The National. In May, The National reported that the project was expected to bring an expected revenue of K130 billion. [In current exchange rate PGK130 billion would be equivalent to €37.3 billion (Euros); A$63.7 billion (Australian); £29.8 billion (British Pound) and US$55.1 billion (American)] This is a very significant  commercial development that is expected to bring PNG about K2.76 billion per year.

Given that this project involves a huge amount of money, why should a leading company executive and the Deputy Prime Minister give conflicting legal interpretations about the deal? The recent article in the Post Courier throws suspicion over certain aspects of the deal and carries the general insinuation that the deal is flawed. By extension, the Deputy Prime Minister’s statement could either be seen as an innocuous lie, a misinformed deception or a decorative misrepresentation whose veracity is located somewhere between half-truth, half-lie and outright lie.

Legality aside, the controversy brings to light not just the moral and semantic distance between truth and falsity or the analytic method by which one could execute to separate truth from falsity but to put it simply, one cannot lie if truth never exist in the first instance. The controversy reveals that lying is indispensable and integral to the art of politics and that truth itself is not a universally cherised value, rather it is contingent, highly malleable and convenient. When circumstances demand the imposition of truth this sets into motion particular pathologies to come into play sometimes with a spirit of vengeance and at other times it induces psychological disabilities to come into force.

One of the ministers who was interviewed by the press was mindful of political retaliation that might ensue as a result of him talking about the deal in the open. When the notorious Sandline Affair was prosecuted in a leadership tribunal in 1998, one of the alleged brokers of the deal, Benias Sabumei, had a temporary loss of memory in the Court room while he was under scrutinty. This self-induced mental state of amnesia made him withhold more specific details about the Sandline deal.

Towards the end of last year, the Post Courier carried stories about how the Prime Minister, Sir Michael Somare, was implicated in a “deep sea fishing deal”. The Prime Minister flatly denied his involvement and explained that his role in that fishing company was that of a trustee acting  on behalf of the Independent State of PNG. His denials were made in a place no less than the National Parliament during an exchange that took place inside the Parliament. Subsequent investigations by the Post Courier revealed that the Prime Minister misled the Parliament and lied to the people of PNG about his involvement in that fishing company.

Rehearsing these news items is not an exercise to open a colosal can of worms or to simply sit back and let loose the cabinets of mendacious curiosities for the sake of rhetorical stimulation. If truth and lie exist, their existence are proportionate to the the weight and consequence they dispense. Truth and lie  operate in an elastic conceptual economy in which their magnitude expands and contracts depending upon the conditions and status of those who dispense it. If lie is as incestuous as a contagion that spreads its influence as an epidemic, imagine the contamination it will impose on public office? If the mendacity of those who have sworn to hold public trust and confidence parade itself as the public face of politics, will there still be room for integrity to show itself as a public virtue?