“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
The first thing that hits you is the heat. It’s a thick, wet blanket that wraps around you the moment you step out of the air-conditioned bubble of Jacksons Airport. Then comes the dust, that fine, orangey grit that seems to hang permanently in the air, catching the light. I hailed a cab, an old Toyota Mark II with a cracked windshield, and slid into the sticky vinyl of the back seat. “Town, backroad way” I said, and the driver, a man with weary eyes, simply nodded.
I leaned forward and with an accent unchanged by the years spent away I asked “mi inap lo laitim simuk?”
The driver nodded and smiled.
I fished out matches and a packet and placed a cigarette to my lips, striking, before inhaling deeply.
As we pulled away, the journey became a stark lesson in contrast.
The flyover, aimed at improving congestion had done a relatively decent job thus far, though now and then cracks could be seen running alongside its concrete railing.
We drove further along, and I glanced out the window; To the right, the brand-new, Chinese-built six-lane highway to Parliament Haus was almost empty, a smooth, surreal ribbon of asphalt.
This was part of the physical transformation: the city had hosted a major sporting event in years gone by. The games had brought stadiums, new hotels, and the flyover, creating pockets of a modern capital that felt, at times, like a film set built on the edge of a cliff. But as my driver quickly veered onto a potholed side road to avoid traffic, the real city re-emerged. The infrastructure since 2001 was a tale of two worlds: gleaming monuments for international events overshadowing the chronic decay of the roads and pipes and overhanging lines that served the people.
The driver took a route that skirted Waigani. I remembered the outrage of the 2000 “Lae Scandal”, the first time I truly understood the word “corruption.” But that was a prelude. The real turning point was the LNG thing signed in 2009 under the previous government.
We were sold a vision of riches, but the project became the root cause of the human tide I now saw flooding the city.
The promise of jobs and spin-off businesses triggered a massive rural-to-urban drift, but the reality was a different story. Customary landowner disputes, exacerbated by politicians manipulating benefits for their own clans, meant many people from the project areas saw little but disruption.
They poured into the capital, joining the thousands already displaced by inter-tribal fighting in the Highlands and the slow collapse of rural agricultural economies, which had been neglected for decades.
Over the years, the only thing that changed, was the ever-increasing amount suddenly going “missing”.
The driver gestured towards the endless settlements sprawling up the hills. “Everyone comes,” he said, his voice flat. “But what is here for them?” He was right.
The city was bursting at the seams. I could see the direct result: services collapsing under the weight of numbers. We passed a hospital that looked more dilapidated than I remembered, its car park overflowing. Along another street, a single, overstretched water truck was trying to service an entire neighborhood, a stark symbol of the chronic water shortages that had plagued the city for years.
It was then I saw a small sign for a non-profit, some NGO that held accountability sessions, the sign almost hidden behind a larger political poster. It was a poignant sight.
I thought of the brave, Sisyphean struggle of these organisations. Groups like this one had fought for decades. They published damning reports on graft, advocated for the cases against corruption and the development of an organization to handle it—a body politicians had promised for years but systematically undermined and delayed in its establishment. They were like doctors trying to treat a patient who was actively poisoning themselves. For every community awareness program they ran, a politician would siphon off his ‘tithes’, funds that could have built a clinic or a school and thus rendering their work a drop in an ocean of malfeasance.
They struggled not just against corruption, but against the sheer, exhausting scale of it.
My thoughts were interrupted by the wail of a siren. A single police vehicle, packed with officers, sped past towards a distant disturbance. The image spoke volumes about the overwhelmed police force. They were understaffed, under-resourced, and often outgunned by raskol gangs.
Their morale was shattered by political interference, where arrests of the well-connected were rarely followed by convictions. The brief era of twenty years ago, which saw expatriate officers embedded in the force, had provided a glimpse of order. But since its scale-back, the Constabulary was left to face a crisis of a magnitude it was never equipped to handle, their presence now a reactive symbol of a state that had lost its monopoly on force.
The driver suddenly detoured again, muttering about “trouble” near Gerehu.
Ethnic violence was another direct consequence. The influx of migrants from different provinces, all competing for the same scarce urban resources, created a tinderbox. Unscrupulous politicians, facing constant votes of no confidence, expertly lit the match, redirecting frustration into tribal hatred to secure their own power bases.
The stale dry of the inner city turned to the wafting smell of salt and seaside views. We finally reached my destination.
I paid the driver, and he gave me a look that seemed to say, “See? This is it.” I got out of the cab.
The journey from the airport was more than a drive; I felt it was a diagnosis.
A juxtapose of skyscrapers rose about me, one with a cross-connecting walkway overhead, not as symbols of progress, but as bridges connecting islands of privilege, bypassing the sea of struggle below.
The state’s face had been lifted with new concrete, but its heart—the police, the services, the social contract—was in critical condition.
I had arrived back in a city where the struggle was not just for survival, but for the very soul of the nation, a battle fought between the glossy veneer of new infrastructure and the crushing weight of systemic failure.