Deadly riots in Papua New Guinea have laid bare the impoverished nation’s growing reliance on private security firms in place of police, local business owners and regional analysts told AFP.
Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister James Marape came to power promising to transform the often-volatile former British colony into the “richest black Christian nation” on Earth.
This push for prosperity will in large part hinge on the ability to shed the Pacific island nation’s dangerous reputation — and to persuade foreign investors it is a safe place to do business.
With its stretched police force frequently mired in scandal, Papua New Guinea’s swelling ranks of private security operators are increasingly tasked with keeping the peace.
On January 11, as angry crowds tore through the capital Port Moresby, torching parked cars, ransacking grocery stores and setting fire to buildings, security company owner Jemimah Pundari said she had small teams of private guards protecting neighbourhood shops.
For a few tense hours, private security personnel were effectively in charge of safeguarding parts of the city, Pundari said.
“There were hundreds of people. We were severely outnumbered with the police not being on the road,” she told AFP.
“They were very brave in protecting those areas.”
AFPTV images of the aftermath showed once-bustling shops reduced to scorched piles of rubble and mangled steel.
At least 25 people died as the violence spread to other parts of the country, police told AFP, while dozens of citizens were shot, burned or wounded with machetes.
Port Moresby remains under a state of emergency, and many on the ground now simply refer to the widespread unrest as “Black Wednesday”.
“I haven’t seen anything of this scale,” Pundari said, recalling the chaos.
“Everybody is saying it’s like a dark cloud just came over the city.
“People were possessed or something. It was every man for himself.”
The riots were triggered when members of the country’s police force went on strike, walking off the job after their pay was mistakenly docked without explanation.
The government would later allege that “rogue” members of the country’s police played a key role in stoking the turmoil. Disgruntled citizens also joined the fray.
– Thinly stretched –
With just one officer for every 1,145 civilians, Papua New Guinea has one of the most thinly stretched police forces in the world.
The ideal ratio to maintain public safety, according to United Nations security experts, is closer to one officer per 450.
Sinclair Dinnen, an Australian researcher who has long focused on crime and politics in Papua New Guinea, said the country has “one of the lowest police-to-population ratios of anywhere in the world”.
“And those police resources are very unevenly distributed across the country. So police are not really able to do a lot, in terms of covering all these sorts of outbursts,” he told AFP.
Preserving law and order is particularly difficult in Papua New Guinea’s jungle interior, where police struggle to stamp out weapons trafficking and frequent violence between tribal groups.
Human Rights Watch says the country “remains a dangerous place to be a woman or girl” due to widespread sexual and gender-based violence as well as weak rule of law.
Travel advice from the US government warns that violent crimes, including sexual assaults, carjackings and armed robberies, are common.
Papua New Guinea’s then-police minister was brutally honest after reviewing the force in 2020, finding it “in complete disarray and riddled with corruption”.
In major urban centres such as Port Moresby, most businesses, shopping centres and housing estates employ some form of private security — part of a booming industry that has rapidly expanded to fill the policing gap.
Demand is so great, the country’s estimated 30,000 private security personnel easily dwarf the 6,000-strong force of professional police officers.
“Businesses, by and large, depend on private security,” said Dinnen, from the Australian National University.
“Some have claimed that it is the third largest employer in the PNG economy.”
‘Lasting consequences’
Papua New Guinea is blessed with vast deposits of gold, gas and minerals.
It boasts a striking array of tropical biodiversity, jungles and beaches of stunning natural beauty, and one of the world’s largest collections of distinct native languages.
But it is also plagued by entrenched inequality; about 40 percent of the population is thought to live in extreme poverty, and the minimum wage has stagnated at less than US$1 an hour.
Former Australian diplomat Mihai Sora, now an analyst with the Lowy Institute, said the latest unrest would have “lasting consequences” for the country’s economy.
“Violence on this scale, and the looting that we saw will have an impact on business confidence,” he told AFP.
“It shows that the cost of doing business in Papua New Guinea is deceptively high, because there are a lot of these overheads to do with security.”
After the violence this month, Pundari, the security firm owner, said private guards in the capital play “a major role in helping the police maintain a certain rule of law and order”.
“Especially in a country like this… anything can happen.”
