Voters across Bougainville head to polling stations as critical regional election gets underway
Port Moresby: Voters across Bougainville headed to polling stations yesterday as a critical regional election gets underway.
The vote also started just days after Bougainville registered its first confirmed COVID-19 case when a young student flew into Buka from the mainland.
This comes as Papua New Guinea had now recorded over 200 cases of COVID-19 and three people had died. 440 candidates are contesting the 40 seats in the region’s parliament, including 25 wanting the presidency.
The big issue
It has been called the most important election yet for Bougainville, because the core role for the next parliament will be negotiating the outcome from last year’s nonbinding referendum, in which 98 percent of Bougainvilleans chose independence from Papua New Guinea.
Many candidates are expecting a drawn out process in the negotiations. One expert on conflict resolution said similar processes in other places have taken up to 10 years. The Bougainville Government itself had laid out a timetable to have negotiation with the PNG Government sorted in time for a resolution to be put to the PNG parliament in September next year.
For that to happen Australian National University academic, Gordon Peake, who had spent most of the last three years working as an advisor in Bougainville, said, as quickly as possible people needed to start laying the groundwork for talks.
The candidates
It was something of a surprise when 25 people linked up to seek the presidency, which had been left vacant by John Momis’s unwilling retirement.
He had wanted a third term but the Supreme Court ruled this would contravene the Bougainville Constitution. Momis said his rights were denied and that his absence from the poll had opened up a “can of worms.”
But people like James Tanis, who was president from 2008 to 2010, and was standing again, said the large numbers were not an issue and the candidates sometimes campaigned together.
While there were three seats reserved for women, there were two women running for the presidency for the first time, and a number of women contesting open seats. Community worker, Marilyn Havini said she had the impression attitudes were changing towards women as political leaders, not only amongst women voters, but men too, and she expects women could take open seats.
COVID-19
Bougainville had been taking extraordinary efforts to ensure that it kept COVID-19 out of the region. President Momis had said it lacked the capacity to cope with an outbreak, although it does have three quarantine facilities, set up with aid donor help.
A State of Emergency, in place since March, is due to end tomorrow.