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One autumn morning, I boarded a plane from Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, to Buka, the capital of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. A collection of islands and atolls the size of Puerto Rico, Bougainville is located 600 miles east of Moresby, across the Solomon Sea. Its southern shore is just three miles from the politically independent Solomon Islands, and its people share a culture, linguistic links and dark skin tone with their Solomon neighbours. But thanks mostly to European colonisers, who drew the borders, Bougainville is the farthest-flung province of Papua New Guinea, whose lighter-toned inhabitants Bougainvilleans often call “redskins”, betraying a sense of otherness in their own country that partly explains why I am writing about them here.
I say partly because if not for the islands’ having fought a bitter, decade-long war against the Australia-backed Papua New Guinea – which remarkably they won – and demanding Papua New Guinea allow Bougainville’s independence by 2027, the story I am about to tell would likely never have happened.
In October 2023, I booked a trip to Buka to report on these developments, budgeting some days at the end to interview leaders of the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG), the formal authority that expects to secure self-rule for its people. But over the previous months I had become transfixed instead by the strange tale of Noah Musingku, a Bougainvillean scam artist who had made a fortune, lost it, then retreated to a remote armed compound in the jungle, where he declared himself the islands’ king. He wore crowns of brass and cowrie shells that, lest there be any ambiguity, spelled out king. An academic who has described Musingku as “Bougainville’s Bernie Madoff” wrote him off as an “irrelevance”, while a diplomatic envoy to Papua New Guinea told me he was a “fucking joke”.
Bougainvilleans had other ideas. Musingku’s purported con – a vast, millenarian Ponzi scheme called U-Vistract – had, since the late 90s, raked in some $232m, perhaps far more, and near as I could tell, it was still plodding on. In 2006, a militia allegedly aligned with the ABG stormed Musingku’s hideout and almost killed him. One man told me that U-Vistract was “just like a mafia”; police have also accused Musingku of plotting to overthrow the ABG. An ABG minister told me that Musingku was just the excuse, or “thorn”, that Papua New Guinea needed to forestall independence. Not since 2012, it seemed, had a foreign reporter set foot in the Royal Kingdom of Papaala, Musingku’s name for his compound in the village of Tonu. Nobody entirely knew what he had been up to in the intervening years, but they were sure it wasn’t good.
Which is all by way of saying, I wanted to meet the king. But after several months, the best lead I had was an obscure YouTube channel offering shaky videos of U-Vistract events. It belonged to a man named Nawera Karrenna, who claimed he could introduce me to Musingku – though when I revisited these messages at my hotel bar in Moresby, I realised that most of them were just his replying “yes” and generally dodging my increasingly desperate and long-winded proposals, which made me suspect that the entire thing was some sort of hoax.
So I was more than a little relieved when, in the early afternoon, I landed and, having sweat so quickly in the heat that I felt as if somebody had thrown a pail of water over me, spotted my royal envoy in a crowd outside Buka airport’s rusting corrugated-steel terminal. Short and broad with sepulchral eyes, Karrenna wore a bucket hat, polo shirt, shorts and flip-flops. We shook hands. He told me he’d once spent several weeks in Manchester, England, trying out for various professional football teams. But he didn’t look like a sportsman. Given the scant number of media visits to Papaala, I remarked glibly, he hardly had his work cut out as a media rep. He shrugged. “HM is a busy man,” he said, using a royal honorific (His Majesty) that I would hear a lot in the ensuing days. Together we rode a taxi five minutes into town, exchanged some cash at a Chinese-run convenience store, and, paying the equivalent of 50 US cents, hopped aboard one of the dozens of brightly painted banana boats darting across the narrow Buka Passage that cleaves its namesake island from the far larger island of Bougainville. It’d be at least another day, Karrenna told me, before we reached the king.
On the other side of the water was Kokopau, a town that doubles as a cab stand for vans and 4x4s headed up-country, and triples as Bougainville’s premier live-music spot. Australia’s primary legacy on Bougainville is Panguna, a colossal, open-pit copper and gold mine that, while dormant, is still one of the largest on earth, and whose controversial operation kindled the Bougainvillean uprising. The secondary legacy is a taste for heavy metal music. Seemingly every other person dresses in denim shorts and band T-shirts – Slayer, Megadeth, Pantera, AC/DC, Metallica, Judas Priest, Van Halen, Black Sabbath. You’d be hard-pressed to find a difference between many Bougainvilleans and a convocation of midwestern roadies if not for the band names that recalled Bougainville’s darkest days: Crisis Survivors, Trouble Zone, Dooms Vein, Mortal Revenge. Almost everybody who climbed into our taxi, a tattered Toyota Land Cruiser, was a metalhead, it seemed. Karrenna wasn’t keen; “white music,” he called it.
We left Kokopau by means of a shoreside highway cradled by coconut palms. It was around two o’clock. By early evening, we would reach Arawa, Bougainville’s former capital, which was built by the Australians to service Panguna. Not coincidentally, it was also the gateway to a sprawling “no-go zone” established by Bougainville’s great, bushy-bearded war hero, Francis Ona, at the tail end of the conflict, in 1998. Tonu and its elusive leader, Musingku, were nestled in the centre of this zone. With any luck I would be shaking the king’s hand in a day or two.
If I really believed that at the time – and I think I did – I was no more deluded than most outsiders who have visited Bougainville.
The maritime historian Samuel Eliot Morison once noted that Bougainville possessed “wilder and more majestic scenery” than he’d encountered anywhere in the South Pacific. The islands offer almost every geographic feature imaginable, from mountains and volcanoes to coral reefs, waterfalls, and a sparkling, pristine coastline. Almost everything is quilted in a dense canopy of palm fronds. Copra – the dried white flesh of coconuts – was Bougainville’s prime export long before copper or gold.
In part owing to this wild abundance, Bougainville and its neighbouring isles have enticed a succession of fair-skinned cads, colonisers and crazies. The French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville lent the island his name after an 18th-century voyage, and he named Buka after a word bellowed at him from the shore (most agree that it likely means “who”).
In 1961, a colonial geologist named Jack Errol Thompson visited a site in central Bougainville, near the sacred mountain of Panguna, and found evidence of a large deposit containing sizeable quantities of porphyry copper, gold and silver. By 1972, Bougainville Copper Ltd (BCL), a subsidiary of the conglomerate Conzinc Riotinto of Australia (later simply Rio Tinto ), had dug one of the largest human-made holes on earth.
The Panguna mine soon became one of the world’s most profitable, accounting for nearly half of Papua New Guinea’s exports. Conzinc Riotinto connected it to Arawa via a vertiginous, 16-mile road and filled the town with rows of whitewashed, two-storey apartment blocks the likes of which Bougainvilleans had never seen. Aussie roughnecks and their families arrived en masse, bringing beer, pies and music. Arawa was an unlikely boomtown.
Those days are long gone. Visitors to Arawa today are greeted by great braids of rusted pipelines that encircle the city, ducking below ground and rising above like huge, mechanical boas. Smokestacks and substations have been overtaken by ferns and creepers. It reminded me of Chernobyl. His Majesty, our driver told me, as we approached the city, “helps many people”. Bougainvilleans were suffering from a cost of living crisis, and the ABG “doesn’t have enough money even for the roads”. Just then, the Land Cruiser jolted across the broken tarmac. He smirked at his own good timing. Bougainville, he said, “is a wrong-way place”.
We arrived at Arawa at dusk, an orange sun disappearing beneath the ridge of a mountain range. The following day, Karrenna guided me around town, pointing out streets where major battles had been fought. He was 34, and his memories of the Crisis, as it is known, were vague. But envisioning the privation that followed, after the Panguna mine shut down, requires little imagination. We passed a row of apartments that once housed BCL’s foreign staff and were now gutted and inhabited by squatters. Beside them was a modest globe erected as a peace memorial but which had long since been stripped down to its wire frame. Karrenna pointed out homes whose owners, he claimed, had invested in U-Vistract: “He’s invested, they’ve invested, this one has invested,” and so on. Investors are still expecting payouts. The poverty is the ABG’s fault, he told me, as we hurled rocks into the Pacific Ocean. “Money is just a belief system.”
“If HM delivers on what he says,” he added, “everyone will run to him.” When will he do that? I asked. Karrenna ignored my question. The morning heat was stupefying. We walked back to my guesthouse, and I packed my things. The Land Cruiser would depart at midday, head into the mountains and the no-go zone, and deliver us to Tonu.
His Majesty was born in 1964, far from Arawa, in a village in southern Bougainville. He says he is the last of eight children – in fact, he claims to be “the lastborn of the lastborn of the lastborn” going back no fewer than 14 generations. But the truth is unclear. What’s certain is that, as a young boy, he joined the island’s Pentecostal movement, a fundamentalist faith that put as much emphasis on financial reward as on liberation from the daily trials of life. Musingku was a “mysterious kind of student”, James Tanis, a schoolmate of his and future ABG president, told me. He’d revelled in rags-to-riches tales about “a beggar who became a millionaire”.
Musingku says his father planted in him the idea to found an alternative banking system “with very high interests”. He claims to have travelled across Papua New Guinea, then to Australia and the US, in search of suitable business models. Somewhere during this period, God appeared to him. “You are the answer,” the Lord told Musingku. “You are the solution.” And so Musingku returned to Port Moresby.
Bougainville was, by this point, mired in conflict. In 1975, as Papua New Guinea prepared for independence from Australia, Bougainville declared itself the Republic of the North Solomons, but the next year settled for increased autonomy and abandoned the name. Meanwhile, Francis Ona, aged 23, joined BCL as a surveyor before switching to driving dump trucks. But over the years, Panguna had swallowed Ona’s home village of Guava, and he distrusted BCL. He took on night shifts as a cleaner, which gave him access to company files, which he photocopied. The files confirmed that the company was lowballing landowners; soon, Ona began to spread the word, including the extent of Panguna’s ecological destruction. In 1988, BCL commissioned an environmental inquiry, but Ona, puckish and with a talent for political theatre, stormed out, declaring it a sham. He demanded 10bn kina (about £2bn) in damages, local ownership and consultation on all future projects in the region. “Land to us is our lifeline and we cannot be separated from it,” he wrote. “We are fighting to save our land from foreign exploitation.”
Not long afterward, local men used stolen dynamite to blow up transmission pylons in the pit of the mine. Regional fighters created the Bougainville Revolutionary Army, or BRA, with Ona as its commander in chief. Papua New Guinea sent in police officers at what it claimed was BCL’s behest, but the sabotage continued. Moresby dispatched the Papua New Guinea Defence Force, which burned homes and fired on civilians from Australian-made helicopters that had been repurposed as gunships. In 1989, Panguna shuttered, and its roughnecks fled from Arawa. “We are the ‘sacrificial lamb’ for the few capitalists whose hunger for wealth is quenchless and unceasing,” read a November 1989 communique by Ona. The Crisis had begun.
In 1990, Papua New Guinea blockaded the islands with gunboats. Thousands died from lack of medicine, as the occupying force herded many people into makeshift “care centres”, where rights groups recorded revenge attacks and disappearances. Fuel reserves ran low. The rebels who’d worked at Panguna – miners, turners, fitters, forgers, joiners, plumbers, painters, smelters, glaziers – scavenged pipes and vehicle parts and refashioned them into more than 50 hydroelectric generators. They also made weapons from the mine’s twisted wreckage.
But the most extraordinary aspect of the BRA’s resistance was the use it made of Bougainville’s erstwhile staple crop: the coconut. Islanders ate its flesh, drank its milk and sealed their wounds with its leaves. They wove it into baskets and homes, burned it to ward off mosquitoes and even made music from the husks. They cooked with it and cleaned their guns with its oil, boiled it into soap, and when they fermented and cooked it, they distilled a fuel that yielded double the mileage of regular diesel. “In some ways the war’s been good to us,” the photojournalist Ben Bohane recalls Ona telling him. “We’ve gone back to our customary ways. There’s no more meat pies and beer … we don’t need money.”
In 1997, Papua New Guinea’s prime minister, Julius Chan, secretly hired a group of South African mercenaries to storm Bougainville in a desperate bid to win the war. The deal leaked. New Guineans rioted in protest, and PNGDF troops took the mercenaries hostage, forcing Chan’s resignation. Eight previous peace efforts had failed, but the ninth, held at a military camp near Christchurch, New Zealand, was successful, thanks to a tarout, or “vomiting session”, that might be understood today as an extreme form of radical honesty. These discussions paved the way for the signing of the Bougainville peace agreement in 2001, in which Papua New Guinea promised to enact in Bougainville, among other things, a disposal of weapons, the formation of the ABG, and within 15 years of that formation, the right for islanders to vote in an independence referendum. But by then, nearly a tenth of Bougainville’s population had been killed, and Ona had refused to take part in the peace talks. “He’d already declared independence,” Shane McLeod, an Australian reporter who covered Ona, told me. “He didn’t really need to go through the hoops of this crummy Bougainville peace process.”
Ona sealed himself and several former BRA men inside a no-go zone surrounding Panguna, rebranding themselves the Me’ekamui Defence Force, or MDF, using a local word meaning “Holy Island”. People flocked to the hero’s new enclave. But he needed money. Fortunately, he’d just met a Bougainvillean man in Moresby who was about to make more than anybody there could imagine.
Years before, Noah Musingku and his brother had devised a scheme they called the Pei Mure Association, spinning a wild, picaresque tale that might have been torn from the diaries of one of Bougainville’s early European interlopers. Pei Mure – “the law of King Pei” – had been forged at an ancient, Edenic kingdom called Papaala, whence he claimed the island’s first ancestors had come. A conclave of chiefs had revived the law in 1922, Musingku said, and added plans to implement a new world banking system.
In 1997, a financial crisis rocked Asia and destabilised the Papua New Guinean economy. Schemes with names such as Bonanza, Windfall, Gold Money and Money Rain proliferated across the nation, promising investors fantastical returns. U-Vistract, which promised up to 100% returns each month, was different. Musingku positioned himself as a man of deep faith, preaching a prosperity gospel that resonated with people crawling from war to deprivation. He sermonised to U-Vistract investors for hours, and demanded their unalloyed loyalty; he created a government, renaming months of the year for gemstones, a move that drew comparisons to the cargo cults prevalent across the Pacific.
For U-Vistract, Musingku courted foreign investors, including the architects of similar frauds elsewhere. Reports circulated of his lavish spending on private jets and events. Senior political figures in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Fiji were believed to have invested. Some of U-Vistract’s early investors saw returns, but the vast majority never did. Within a couple of years, Papua New Guinea, Australia and the World Bank moved to freeze U-Vistract’s assets, which were estimated at almost a quarter of a billion dollars. Musingku responded by folding the scheme into his bogus Kingdom of Papaala, crowning himself King David Peii II. U-Vistract’s missives blamed Papua New Guinea’s poor economy on the country’s godlessness, and in 2001, a promoter told angry investors at a U-Vistract event that only born-again Christians would receive payouts, a provision that would preclude adulterers, gamblers and smokers. The payments would come soon, the promoter vowed – but they would be made according to “God’s will and timing.”
As authorities liquidated U-Vistract’s accounts, Musingku fled to Solomon Islands. But in 2003, under legal pressure, he returned to Bougainville, where he hooked up with an old acquaintance, Francis Ona. The war hero had changed. He now claimed that he could cure cancer, Aids and other illnesses, and travelled to Arawa and Buka on the bed of a truck, telling crowds that he was Bougainville’s king. More ominously for his followers, Ona shaved off the Garibaldi beard that had been the emblem of his arcadian struggle.
Ona had broken “the covenant he signed with God and his people”, one former BRA soldier told me. So when, at a bizarre coronation ceremony near Guava, on a drizzly morning in May 2004, Musingku placed a crown of cowries upon Ona’s head and declared him “King Francis Dominic Dateransy Domanaa, head of state of the Royal Kingdom of Me’ekamui”, even a onetime leader in Ona’s militia called it “bullshit”. Bougainville’s revolutionary hero, stripped to the waist, looked less like a monarch than a tired, vulnerable old man standing in the rain, surrounded by conmen.
Me’ekamui and Papaala would be “twin kingdoms”, Musingku announced, and would open a new Central Bank of Me’ekamui. He moved the U-Vistract headquarters to Tonu, where unpaid “helpers” brought him food, built homes, or did yard work. The whole thing was a farce – but still it threatened the legitimacy of the ABG. In April 2005, Musingku hired five Fijian mercenaries to protect him, and said that 800 more were on their way. “God has bigger plans for Bougainville and the region,” he wrote, “and no one can change or stop it from happening regardless of his education, position, power or authority.” It looked to anybody outside the no-go zone as if Ona and Musingku were preparing to take Bougainville by force.
Then, late that July, Ona died at the age of 52. Some suspected foul play. Musingku declared that Ona had recently granted him control of Me’ekamui, and he quickly conscripted more than 200 people as security personnel, training them at Tonu under the Fijians. Musingku quickly grew into the role of mad king, spending entire days in his office hammering away at a laptop or talking on a satellite phone. His subjects lived by a strict regimen of fasting, church and military drills. Musingku would emerge only if accompanied by security, his helpers sweeping the ground before him. He would fast for long periods and, when he did eat, allowed only close family members to prepare his meals.
In May 2006, the local police clashed with members of the Me’ekamui Defence Force and two of Musingku’s Fijians. The rebels reportedly stabbed a policeman and torched three police stations, and authorities captured two of Musingku’s lieutenants as they attempted to flee. “This is the beginning of more arrests to come to make sure at the end of the day we totally get U-Vistract out of Bougainville,” said the ABG leader, Joseph Kabui. Then, one November morning at about four o’clock, one of the Fijians, a former UN peacekeeper named Maloni Namoli, heard a dog bark around Tonu’s King Square. Moments later, a column of ex-BRA combatants and two police officers burst into the village and fired on Musingku’s royal guards. Amid the ensuing raid, the attackers reportedly killed four men and lost one of their own. Musingku tried to escape, but an M16 round tore through his jaw, spraying blood all over the floor of his royal office.
According to Namoli, he grabbed the wounded king and sped into the surrounding jungle. He had feared the worst, but Musingku survived – and after around a month in hiding, he returned to his bamboo casbah, his battle scar serving as a symbol of the suffering that his people had endured in the war. ABG leaders denied they’d sanctioned the raid but had already lost credibility with the public. They had come for the king and missed. Worse yet, they had created a living martyr, a man convinced it was God’s plan for him to revive U-Vistract and lead Bougainville to independence. He hasn’t left Tonu since.
In 2019, Bougainville held a referendum in which nearly 98% of voters chose independence. But Moresby has drawn the ABG into a legal battle since then, threatening not to ratify the poll’s results. The stalemate plays into the hands of the “U-Vistract faction”, as politicians have called Musingku’s rogue kingdom. In 2009, Musingku minted his own Bougainvillean kina to compete with the official Papua New Guinean kina, believing that whoever controls the currency controls the islands. He should also pay back his investors, I suggested. Mapah chimed in. “HM will come good,” he said, raising his eyebrows emphatically, a local tic. I began to ask another question, but he cut me off. “Yes,” he reiterated. The eyebrows remained motionless. “He’ll come good.”
The skies above Arawa darkened as we left town, and by the time we reached a roadblock at the border of the no-go zone a half hour later, rain was falling in ropes. Beneath a tarp on the side of the road, I paid sentries 300 kina (£57) for a Papaalan “visa”; it resembled a dry-cleaning ticket. We trundled over the mountain ridge soon after, the rains subsiding as we descended along a gravel track into Panguna. It is an eerie place. Vast factories and processing plants slumped into the earth, stripped bare like knotted jungle gyms. The pit itself extended almost to the horizon, its stepped ramparts sinking below the earth like an upturned pyramid.
Beyond the mine, the road disappeared altogether, and we spent the remaining four or so hours crawling through wet, cleft tongues of mud. It was dark when we rolled into a tiny village that housed about 50 people in a dozen thatch residences. My audience with His Majesty would have to wait until tomorrow. Our accommodation for the meantime was a dilapidated guesthouse run by Philip Mapah, a grey-haired man with jaundiced eyes who had been U-Vistract’s long-serving finance minister, and his wife, who went only by “Missus”.
I rose early the following morning. Mapah left for Tonu, a tattered satchel tucked under his arm like a Willy Loman of the tropics. Karrenna told me that we would be summoned to Papaala at any moment, but that HM had “his own priorities”. I told him that, as I’d travelled more than three days to meet him, I hoped I’d be one of them. He gave me a noncommittal nod. Lunch came and went.
Around four o’clock, Karrenna returned and told me that we should have sent a slip of paper with Mapah, explaining the purpose of my visit to HM. I sulked. “You know,” he clucked, “people have been waiting 20 years, not just a few hours.” Nonetheless, he added, we should head down to the king’s headquarters and see if we could get lucky. I threw on a shirt and had sweat through it by the time we reached a roadblock beside a sign announcing the border of “Tonu City; Papaala Meekamui; Twin Kingdom; U Vistract protectorate; Ophir peace zone”. (Ophir is another name for Bougainville.) A wiry man of about 60, wearing dark fatigues, a wide-brimmed hat, and an MDF armband, beckoned me into the compound.
It was now 5.30pm, and the sun was setting. The king was ready for me. Musingku, however, would not check my credentials until the internet came on at six. I had submitted them weeks ago, I told Karrenna, losing patience. Didn’t he see through all this? I asked him, unwisely. Had he himself invested in U-Vistract? “I’m not poor,” he snapped back. “I can eat.” All well and good, I replied, but it’s pretty rough to rob somebody’s home and then tell them they should feel lucky to have food. He bristled. “You cannot use that word,” he said. “I’m gonna let these guys know you said that. I think you wasted your time coming here. The king is busy. So I think it’s bad luck, the wrong timing.” His mouth curled into a snarl. I thought he might strike me. I backtracked, seeing that in Karrenna’s eyes I had finally become the duplicitous foreign hack bent on bad-mouthing HM that he’d suspected I was all along. I was saved by a bearded man with a clipboard who told us that HM was ready, and that I’d have 30 minutes with him. It was dark now, and bugs tangoed in the halogen light of a small hut tucked behind a chainlink fence. Namoli escorted me through. I signed a guest book, removed my shoes and stepped into the king’s office.
I had spent the past few months watching so many videos of Noah Musingku, reading about him, hearing of him from others, that when I finally entered the citadel of the Kingdom of Papaala and shook the hand of the short, smiling man before me, I was stunned into silence. The room was about the size of a studio apartment. Its walls were decorated with woven coconut leaves, canes, fans and other traditional items. Musingku’s Acer laptop sat at the centre of his desk, which was crowded with strange ornaments and gewgaws: potted plants, perfume jars, plastic bottles filled with scented oil, business cards, maps, loudspeakers, a globe, several smartphones and tablets, towers of well-thumbed paperwork, and stacks of illegal blue, green and purple Bougainvillean kina notes. The king’s throne was draped in a purple satin throw. Behind him was a plastic banner in blue and green that read, in what looked like Comic Sans, “HM King David Peii II Government of Bougainville Island”. Below it was the Papaalan flag, a more stylised version of the Bougainvillean one, with coloured rings and a rainbow and stars, and a clip-art-style upe. The king smiled as I scanned the room in near disbelief.
And here was Musingku himself. A little tighter in the belt than he was in the videos I’d played on repeat, his eyes were still wide and unyielding, half hidden beneath cowries that hung like bangs from a beaded crown that read “king” along the band and clacked quietly as he spoke. He smiled giddily the entire time and wore the red coat of an 18th-century British soldier, with a gold aiguillette and a powder-blue sash.
He looked a little like a combination of Rick James and Adam Ant. Why the red coat? “Every country is ruled by someone,” Musingku told me. “We talk about a kingdom. A kingdom encompasses everybody – all religions are part of the kingdom, whether you are Muslim or Christian or Hindu.” A lot of answers went this way – wordy, with references to history and religion that might better have been summed up with a shrug. How, I asked him, did Papaala fit into Bougainville’s independence movement?
“Everyone in Bougainville is fighting for independence – we’ve been fighting for it for the past 48 years,” he said. “But under the ABG it’s independence. Under Me’ekamui it’s sovereignty. There’s a big difference between independence and sovereignty. Independence: somebody grants it to you. Sovereignty is by declaration – you proclaim it, and you make it work. Just like the US became independent by its own declaration. England did not grant it to the US, sovereignty is under God almighty. Independence is at the UN.”
The ABG’s protracted negotiations with Papua New Guinea were tantamount to litigating the terms of Bougainvilleans’ serfdom; no wonder Francis Ona had rejected them outright. Musingku described his relationship with Ona as “connecting the software and hardware” – the hardware of Ona’s no-go zone and the software of U-Vistract’s accounts. He told me that U-Vistract had 930,000 clients until Papua New Guinea shut it down. Nonetheless, “everyone invested” since then, he said, chuckling. “Even the ABG president invested.” (A spokesperson denied this.) Claims that U-Vistract was a Ponzi scheme or a cult, he told me, were simply born of ignorance. “It’s ready for me to just touch the trigger,” he said. “When we kick off, nothing will stop us.”
Namoli, who had joined us, nodded approvingly. Karrenna hitched his phone to a tripod and filmed the scene. “Money answers all things,” he chirped. It was the happiest he’d looked the entire trip. I motioned to the piles of Bougainvillean kina: people had told me that Musingku was stealing gold from Panguna, I said. “We don’t need to dig it up,” he replied. Bougainville itself is the reserve. “We don’t need to disturb it.”
I asked Musingku whether he feared a repeat of the 2006 attack. He didn’t. “Everyone just wants payouts,” he told me. “When they get payouts, they will be united.” Nonetheless, he added, he would “not surrender” his claim to the islands, arguing that they should break the control of a global “serpentine system”. Musingku spoke in platitudes and riddles so plainly preposterous they were almost cleansed of meaning. I suppose this is part of the con; to pour on such grandiloquence that you convince everybody you’re a savant. Like a televangelist, say. Affinity fraud, experts call it: appealing to the commonality of religion, ethnicity or culture to squeeze money out of a huge number of people. Bernie Madoff did it. Noah Musingku does it, too – and he does it well.
The next morning we headed back to Arawa. In the Land Cruiser I sat next to a middle-aged man named Thomas, who claimed he worked for the king, processing spreadsheets of investments in U-Vistract. He was concerned that Musingku hadn’t linked the system to Visa or Mastercard, meaning that Bougainvilleans couldn’t withdraw their funds. He added, exasperated, that the king had stolen gold. “Francis Ona gave him gold in 200-litre drums,” he said. “About four drums. Then he smuggled it overseas to Australia … he’s a bloody fucking millionaire, Noah Musingku.”
It was hot when we reached the no-go-zone checkpoint, where I sat with its guard, a bald, 60-year-old man in wraparound sunglasses who introduced himself as Alex. He had worked the roadblock for decades – first for a limestone firm, then for Ona, and today for Musingku. He’d invested in U-Vistract “when it started”, he said. “Most of us who work here are investors.” He has eight kids. Musingku hasn’t paid him a kina in years. “But I still stay,” he said. “Because I believe we will come out in the end. If we move out without seeing what we fought for …” He trailed off, thumbing the visa I’d paid for a couple days earlier before clearing his throat. “I don’t have any doubts.”
Karrenna and I parted the next day, and I returned up the coast to Buka. The independence process was faltering. That week, Papua New Guinea had declared that the 2019 referendum was nonbinding, prompting anger among ABG officials. (Last September, both parties agreed to fresh negotiations that would again be mediated by New Zealand.) I expected to find a town in the throes of nationalistic fervour, but it was a sleepy place, and few people wanted to discuss politics.
Ishmael Toroama, who had been one of Francis Ona’s military commanders, became the ABG’s president in 2020 pledging to deliver independence and to vanquish corruption. More recently he has sought to reopen Panguna. Rio Tinto divested from the mine in 2016, reportedly leaving an Arabian-horse breeder, a former Australian government minister, and an American investment banker and novelist as its prospective saviours. Many Bougainvilleans fear that Panguna’s revival could rip open the cultural wounds that had precipitated the Crisis. But an independent Bougainvillean government would require an estimated quarter of a billion dollars to function, a sum nothing except the mine could come close to matching.
Bougainville has become an unlikely pawn in the struggle between Washington and Beijing for hegemony in the Pacific. Papaala and the ABG “have to resolve and find a compromise”, Aloysius Laukai, the manager of a local radio station, told me. Otherwise, Bougainville could be “like North and South Korea”. James Tanis, too, frets that Musingku could join a growing archipelago of non-state actors, “like Houthis and Hamas … I’m not saying he’s dangerous now, but I’m worried about the potential. Because he has access to weapons. What if he decides to become a proxy for Iran? This man is about creating an alternative system to the western one. So in terms of doctrine and ideology, he’s already where the Iranians are.”
It seemed to me that the ABG was caught in a double bind: try to liquidate Musingku again, and risk Papua New Guinea’s insisting that Bougainville isn’t ready for statehood; leave him untouched, and he just might contrive another scam or foment a violent secessionist movement. “To suggest that probably we’ll go and smoke him out,” Ezekiel Massat, the ABG’s attorney general, told me, “that’s not our intention. He’s a Bougainvillean. But we say his time will be up shortly. This scheme that he operates will die a natural death. All his brothers and the brothers’ wives and people who surrounded that king will slowly put him out.”
Tanis wasn’t so sure. He’d never come across anybody who was “dead against” the king, he said. “Noah Musingku did not hold them at gunpoint and take their money; they invested because of their own greed.”
Why hadn’t one of U-Vistract’s conned investors tried to kill him? I asked. People have died in Bougainville for far less.
“Killing him will shut the door that they ever get paid,” said Tanis. “Keeping him alive continues to keep the hope alive.”
After I left Bougainville, I continued my conversations with Musingku. He impressed upon me his belief that he wasn’t a danger to the ABG or Bougainville, and that everyone should work together – that U-Vistract would be the software to Papaala’s hardware, as it were. In January last year, a U-Vistract source leaked to me a letter from Musingku to the ABG that proved he’d kept at his scam. “I have heard that there are outstanding bills and invoices owed by the ABG to our lovely citizens, service providers, business houses, institutions, schools, hospitals, etc,” Musingku wrote in the missive, “dating back to many years and worth many millions”.
Please, compile and send to my Crown Administration a complete list of their names, companies, nature of payment and the amounts owed. My office will immediately instruct the Governor of CBOB (Central Bank of Bougainville) to release the needed funds as a priority. […] Note that although PNG banks ceased dealing with cheques at the end of December 2023 under IMF instructions, our sovereign banks are not affected in any way. I now look forward to your prompt response so we can together address and resolve the manifold cries, worries, sufferings and lamentation of our people soonest.
Yours Sincerely,
HM King David Peii Upeii 2nd •
A longer version of this piece appeared in Harper’s
