By Alfred Sasako
WEST Rennell landowners have kept up criticisms of their MP, accusing him of serving his own interests rather than those of the people he represents in Parliament.
They took up two full colour pages of advertisement to vent their anger. The two-page advertisement appears as a centrespread in today’s Island Sun newspaper. It carries the signatures of landowners in Wards 3 – 5.
In a statement accompanying the signatures, the landowners said the call by their MP for the closure of mining on West Rennell is not genuine.
“It is a campaign strategy to lure voters for the upcoming National General Election.
“This is because he only highlighted the mining operation under APID/BMSI in his articles but he never mentioned anything about the mining operation that is carried out by Worldlink …,” they said
They said one of the reasons why their MP wants mining operation on Rennell to stop was because he did not “want other people to be well off. He just wants to be better off than everyone so that he could manipulate them in his campaign to be re-elected to serve his own interest and not the interest of the people”, the statement said.
The statement said social instability on Rennell was not caused by mining.
“We are the ones to be blamed for all these when we failed to create avenues to engage our women and children in order to prevent such social instability.”
The landowners also turned on members of the public for criticising the mining operations on Rennell, saying “we learned nothing from all those lousy noises”.
