Some years ago, a Papua New Guinean Member of Parliament (MP) was quoted in the local media saying that people from his electorate treated him as a “walking ATM (automated teller machine)”. Members of his electorate perceived him as a cash-dispensing machine by the whim of every request - that he would meet every need and want.

The underlying mentality behind the above claim is at the core of the leadership challenges faced by generations of our elected leaders in our three tiers of government, particularly the national MPs. It is also central to the manner in which growing numbers of us, the citizens perceive an MP, and configure or rally our support for a candidate during a national election accordingly.

The political debacle that has descended on our Parliament at this time has much to do with the mentality of seeing the MP’s position as the conduit for the benefit personally and for sectarian interests as much it is for the esteemed causes for the welfare of a country.

I have written here earlier this year that the MPs tend to be slaves of the expectations of their supporters who back them during an election. The individuals and businesses who support a candidate to win and become MP expect the elected leader to use the position and influence to do them favours whilst in office.

This remains one of the biggest burdens many of our MPs carry during their term in office. Unfortunately, therefore have been MPs who have been caught out and punished since independence for facilitating personal gain using the public offices they hold. The numbers of those caught out may be small compared to the magnitude of the problem, but still at least some defaulting MPs were successfully prosecuted.

As I discussed some weeks ago, our political party system and fundraising mechanism for elections are not well established and articulated as in other more mature democracies. This renders candidates and sitting MPs and their supporters to fend for themselves to the most part. The candidates and their supporters have to self-finance or put to use the resources they have for the election bid. The support a candidate receives in an election has strings attached to it – that the candidate when elected into Parliament, ought to return the favour using the position he holds.

Some of our MPs might put on a façade that all is well for them as national leaders who ascribe to democratic ideals of good governance and so forth. But at the back of their mind is the constant fear of not meeting the expectations of those that financed and supported their election bid.

In the case of sitting MPs, the temptation to engineer schemes to channel public funds and resources of re-election is present at the time. Unfortunately, many MPs do go down the path to use the incumbency of their respective offices to give themselves every chance to be re-elected. Our MPs are constantly pressured to meet a growing list of needs and wants of the constituency they represent. The needs and wants are both formal for the development of the electorate and secondly for personal benefit of especially of their supporters during the election. The personal benefits as much to do with repayment of dues owed during a campaign period when members of an electorate supported a candidate who eventually won a seat in Parliament.

The expectations of personal benefit by the supporters of an MP many a times, dictates the allocation of public funds and deployment of resources in a district or province. The MP also has his own list of personal expectations or wants to be fulfilled, which often revolves around amassing adequate resources to deploy in the next election period to seek re-election. Re-election is a big challenge for MPs. They must be resourceful enough to support their re-election campaign.

The fear of losing an election is constantly at the back of the minds of an MP. This drives them to be wanting to be in government so they have “access” to funding and resources as backers of an incumbent Prime Minister and his government. Some MPs do bid or expect the Prime Minister to give them a ministry, depending on their seniority and status in terms of experience and so on. Certain MPs through their parties also bid for senior ministries. This is because such MPs feel that if they are allocated ministries, they stand a better chance of utilizing the office to strengthen their political parties and more so to position themselves for re-election. Members of the public or the voters do see that and often add more pressure on their MPs. When their MP becomes a minister, they see it as an opportunity to double or triple their expectations of the MP to support them because they assisted in the MP’s election bid.

In some electorates, the above described situation is less elaborate. However, the situation is changing as more people move around the country and also learn through the various media about how politics is played in one part of the country and imitate those approaches.

At the end of the day, money talks, and the ordinary people have learnt the art of commodifying the election support for their candidates of choice. The net result is that the MPs are increasingly being seen as sources of cash and other resources that someone could mine. So our fabled “walking ATM” prefixed at the top of this article suffices. The MPs therefore, have a significant role to play to ‘educate’ many of their supporters and others in their electorates who see them as ‘walking ATMs’. The supporters must be educated that their MP is not a ‘walking ATM’.