Two Ministers, One Master: The Sepik Stitch-Up by PAUL L.

Two Ministers, One Master: The Sepik Stitch-Up
by PAUL L. KEBAIJA

Two Cabinet ministers walked into a room in Port Moresby on Friday and signed a piece of paper that the Registrar of Political Parties called unprecedented. Richard Maru of Nesenel Unity Pati and Belden Namah of PNG Party agreed to campaign together as coalition partners and sister parties ahead of GE27, Emmanuel Pok welcomed it as the first of its kind since the registry was established in 2001, precisely what OLIPPAC was written to encourage. Read it that way and it is a good news story about party consolidation in a system that has never managed any.

Read the map instead.

Maru holds Yangoru-Saussia in East Sepik. Namah holds Vanimo-Green in West Sepik. Between them they are pitching a Greater Sepik bloc, and the Greater Sepik already has a rallying point. Allan Bird is the East Sepik Governor, he has been named repeatedly as the alternative prime minister, and his warning in the same report is the tell: Bird told minor parties to unite, because scattered votes only benefit the ruling Pangu Pati. He is not warning about Pangu winning seats in the Sepik. He is warning about the Sepik vote being cut into pieces small enough that Pangu does not have to.

Two ministers, one government

Here is the part that should not be waved past. Both men signing this agreement are sitting ministers in James Marape's government. Maru is Minister for International Trade and Investment. Namah is Minister for Tourism, Arts and Culture. They are announcing a vehicle to form the next government while drawing the salary and the portfolio of this one. Nobody resigned. Nobody was sacked. There has been no rebuke from the Prime Minister's office about two of his ministers publicly organising a rival bloc eight months out. In any government that felt threatened by this, there would have been consequences by Monday. The absence of consequences is the story.

One cannot prove the Prime Minister ordered this. Nobody can, and anyone who says otherwise is selling you something. But you do not need a signed instruction to read a political operation. You need only ask who benefits, and the answer is not Maru, who has never led a party into government, and it is not Namah, who has spent the better part of a decade in opposition wilderness, at one point holding it almost alone. The beneficiary is the man who needs the Sepik divided.

Namah's long walk

Namah's position deserves particular attention, because it is the most complete political reversal in the country. He was the face of opposition to this government. He carried the anti-Marape case when almost nobody else in the Haus would. He now says the country needs strong political alliances and political stability, and that this partnership will deliver transparency, good governance and accountability.

Stability is the word to watch. In PNG, *stability* has never meant sound institutions. It has meant nobody moves a vote of no confidence. It is the ruling party's word, it has always been the ruling party's word, and it has now come out of the mouth of the man who used to be the reason the ruling party needed it.
A four-term MP does not forget which side of the chamber he is standing on. He decides.

Why Momase, why now

Pangu's Momase problem is not a rumour, it is arithmetic. The party's northern base has been eroding while Bird's stature has grown, and Marape has been sufficiently rattled by Bird to attack him by name over East Sepik's development record, while claiming credit for the K340 million the European Union brought into the province.

If Bird consolidates Greater Sepik behind a single alternative, Momase stops being a region Pangu negotiates with and starts being a region that negotiates with Pangu. That is a threat to a sitting prime minister in a way that no individual MP is.

The counter is not to beat Bird. It is to give Sepik voters a second Sepik option, respectable, well-funded, led by two men with genuine standing, and pointed at the same voters. Not a rival. A splitter. That is what an alliance of two serving ministers, launched with the Registrar's blessing and the government's silence, looks like from where I sit.

The test

We would be glad to be wrong, and there is a clean way to find out.
If this bloc is genuine, Maru and Namah will resign their ministries and cross the floor before the writs. A party preparing to form the next government does not need portfolios in this one. If they are still on the front bench in December, still voting with Pangu, still calling it stability, then the people of the Sepik will know exactly what they signed on Friday, and who they signed it for.

Sepik has been used as a bargaining chip in Waigani for fifty years. They do not have to hand over the chip themselves.

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