If All 8 Million Papua New Guineans Prayed On Our Knees Every Day, Would God Bless Us With A Prime Minister like Jose Mujica? By David Igata, PNG Blogs, Retrieved 27/10/14 (Edited) Meet one of the worlds poorest head of govt in the democratic country of Uruguay. The poorest president in the world is Jose Mujica. He has been president of Uruguay since 2010. President Mujica gives 90% of his salary away to charity every year, choosing NGOs that help poor people & small business entrepreneurs. How much does Peter O’Neill give to charity? We don’t know. We don’t even know how much money Peter O’Neill has or makes. We don’t even know for certain how he makes his money, except the rumours, or how he made so much money in so few years. That is how crazy secretive our country is, But we allow it. The average PNGian has no idea how much money Peter O’Neill makes but the average citizen of the still developing country of Uruguay knows how much President Mujica makes per fortnight. It is pretty good salary, about what our own MPs make. About K14,800 per fortnight but that is before taxes are removed. However President Mujica has no bank accounts as he lives hand to mouth. He also has no debts as he lives in an old farmhouse that is fully paid for. Not a large or an expensive house but a rundown one that is connected only by dirt road. That house is actually in his wife’s name. She is a politician, serving in the Uruguay parliament. She also donates some of her salary to charity. The Uruguay President has a big temptation not to live like this. The govt actually provides a luxurious house for the President of Uruguay in its capital city. President Mujica resist’s this temptation & chooses to grow flowers on the farm in his spare time. President Mujica’s main asset whose ownership is in his name is an old vehicle called a Volkswagen, which he drives around himself. Few PNGians would want to be seen driving around such a small vehicle. He attends the local public hospital for all his medical needs, we dont see our politicians do that. Uruguay is the 2nd least corrupt country in Sth America according to Transparency International. Also Jose Mujica does not need many bodyguards for protection. How did this man come to believe in living so simply and putting the people of Uruguay first? It turns out that Jose Mujica was once a revolutionary, a guerrilla fighter, just like the BRA soldiers. He fought guerrilla style in a city of Uruguay with the Tupamaros movement who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. In March 1970 he was gunned down while resisting arrest, injuring 2 policemen. He was shot 6 times but a doctor sympathetic to the revolution saved his life. He was imprisoned several times but eventually released & pardoned. Here we have a man living such a simple Christian like lifestyle that even our most honest PNG politicians do not come close to. Uruguay is a richer country than PNG yet this politician chooses to live like a grassroots person in his own country would. Simple farmer style. Uruguay does not even call itself a Christian country like PNG. Since 1916, the church & govt have been strongly separated. About 58% of Uruguay people identify themselves as Christian while about 40% do not identify themselves as belonging to any particular religion. Despite all this, are the Uruguay people doing something that makes God bless them more than PNG? Or did God give humans thinking brains with the expectation that we would develop & use our brains to figure out how to solve problems for ourselves? Is the reason why we have never seen the likes of such a PNG politician in many years because we aren’t praying as much as people in Uruguay? Or is it more likely because we let ourselves be easily fooled by the handouts & bribes of those contesting in our elections? It is time for us to take a cold hard look at ourselves & why we end up with such corrupt, greedy, vain, nontransparent leaders as we currently have in house parliament. Jose Mujica is a role model for living the life of Jesus Christ. None of our PNG politicians even come close to those standards......FOOD FOR THOUGHT LEADERS.....
Posted on: Sun, 30 Nov 2014 11:38:22 +0000