FOURTEEN YEARS ON, JUFFA DISCOVERS ISIVINI

by MICHAEL J. PASSINGAN

The Governor of Oro has announced K1.5 million to restore a police presence at Isivini in Ijivitari District, where a gang calling itself "I Don't Care" has, by his own account, shut down two schools and cut residents off from government services. You cannot restore what was never lost. The Governor is confirming that a police presence existed in Isivini, that it went, and that it stayed gone long enough for a criminal group to fill the vacuum and close the schools.

Juffa has been Governor since July 2012. Fourteen years. Three mandates. The vacuum is his.

He did not have to be taken at his word on this. Standing in the same story, Southern Region Commander Joe Puri described rural police stations across the region as closed, redundant and lying idle, and called on district authorities to commit funds and work with police. That is a Constabulary commander telling elected officials, publicly, that they have not been paying for policing in their own districts. Ijivitari is not exempt from that.

Against fourteen years of that, K1.5 million is not a policy. It is a deposit.

The second announcement is thinner still. The Governor says he is putting together a proposal, an assessment, not yet delivered, to be handed to police command and the Police Minister, asking that groups like this be declared terrorist organisations so they fall under the Counter-Terrorism Act.

Consider what that costs. Reclassifying young men from Isivini as terrorists requires a submission and a signature. Rebuilding the police posts Puri says are lying idle requires money the province did not spend. One of these is available in an election year. The other required fourteen years of unglamorous budgeting.

And consider who is proposing it. Juffa built his national reputation warning about unchecked state power, against loggers, against the immigration racket, against a government he judged too willing to reach past the Constitution. The Counter-Terrorism Act 2024 was introduced, read twice and passed in a single sitting day. Its definition of terrorism is wide enough to reach communal violence defined by shared custom or place of residence. Its penalties start at fifty years. It has already been used to switch off Facebook.

Juffa of all people should be able to see what he is asking for: that the Act's most criticised feature, a definition elastic enough to swallow ordinary criminality and, eventually, ordinary dissent, be stretched further, and tested first on his own constituents. A gang that closes schools is a policing failure. Calling it terrorism does not fix the failure; it renames it, and hands the state a precedent it will not return.

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