Noah Musingku

Noah Musingku (born 1964), also known as King David Peii II, is a Bougainvillean conman.

In the late 1990s, he created a highly successful Ponzi scheme called U-Vistract. Facing prosecution from Papua New Guinean authorities, Musingku fled to the Solomon Islands in 2002. He returned to Bougainville and holed up with Francis Ona, the secessionist leader. While Bougainville is administered by the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG), Ona claimed that Bougainville, which he called Me'ekamui, was already an independent state.

Background

Noah Musingku was born in 1964, in Tonu, a small village in Siwai, South Bougainville. In the late 1970s, Musingku went to Buin High School. His schoolmates included James Tanis, who later became president of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, and Timothy Masiu, the member of parliament for South Bougainville. Tanis remembers Musingku as a "mysterious kind of student" who was enthralled by rags-to-riches stories and bragged that his father was a Japanese spy during World War II who taught him how to read palms. After Tanis and his friends got caught stealing lab equipment to make an "invisibility potion" they drank, Musingku complained that they had messed up his recipe. Musingku later attended Kerevat National High School on New Britain. After he graduated, he briefly served in the Papua New Guinea Defence Force.

Musingku took '' didiman'' and architectural courses at Unitech, but he never completed them. Tanis recalled that, in 1988, when he saw Musingku again, he was going to classes in full military uniform and ran distance races holding a wooden stick as if it were a rifle. He studied political science at the University of Papua New Guinea, where he served as president of the National Union of Students.

In 1988 a civil war began with workers and landowners from Panguna mine. This mine, owned by the PNG government and Bougainville Copper, a subsidiary of Rio Tinto Group, was established under Australian aegis. A Unilateral Declaration of Independence was made on 17 May 1990, but Australian and New Zealand-brokered peace talks tended to ignore this fact. Francis Ona controlled over half of the island, and proclaimed himself king of Me’ekamui ("holy land") in May 2004.

U-Vistract

In 1997, seven years after the unilateral declaration of independence, the Bougainville Revolutionary Army was in control of the island, but its leadership split into factions. Ona was in control of the army, and sought full independence. Papala Chronicles Issue 7 p 10

Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) found U-Vistract to be an unlicensed securities and investment program.

:''Within a few years, some 70,000 Papua New Guineans had deposited K350 million into U-Vistract alone. U-Vistract also attracted followers in Australia, Solomon Islands and Fiji. In Australia, a small number of Queensland investors contributed some AUD500,000 between July and October 1999.''

From Australia, he went to Port Moresby,. While in Port Moresby, he tried to set up a bank in the old Hawaiian Bank building, but he was shut down by the PNG government and forced to leave to the Solomon Islands. He began again to set up his system, but the Australian police in the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) forced him out. In 2003 he travelled to Ona's headquarters in Guava, Panguna, Bougainville, and established a bank there. Two years later he was able to travel to his ancestral village of Tonu, where he established his bank headquarters in an old cattle farm owned by the paramount chief.Ilya Gridneff
"U-Vistract conman offers 'Jesus money'"
''Sydney Morning Herald'', 8 July 2009

Kingship

Musingku stayed in the small Me'ekamui-controlled "no go zone" before returning to Tonu, his home village, in 2004. Declaring Tonu the Kingdom of Papaala, he rechristened himself King David Peii II, and established a 500-man militia named the "Me'ekamui Defense Force". Musingku continued his scams, which took the form of banks. He allied with Me'ekamui, which he had convinced Ona to restructure as a kingdom. After Ona died in 2005, Musingku proclaimed himself the king of Papaala and Me'ekamui. His unrecognized micronation, a small compound, remains. Other Me'ekamui factions do not recognize his authority.

Musingku's ideology is radically nationalistic and heavily influenced by the prosperity gospel and Pentecostal Christianity; with ''Guardian'' reporter Sean Williams commenting that his style of speech bore many similarities to that of televangelists. Musingku rejects any collaboration with the Papua New Guinean government as supposedly degrading to the people of Bougainville, and is hostile to western cultural influence for similar reasons. He justifies his status as King by arguing that kingship is the most universal form of leadership; allowing religious differences to be papered over.

After the 2019 Bougainville independence referendum, the ABG expressed an interest in integrating remaining holdouts to its authority into the independence process. The only two significant such holdouts were Musingku and Damien Koike of Konnou. Koike subsequently agreed to co-operate with the ABG, leaving Musingku as the last remaining Me'ekamui holdout. As the independence process stalled in the following years, many ABG leaders became concerned that Musingku would take advantage of delays to forment an insurrection; James Tanis expressing to ''The Guardian'' that Musingku's anti-western ideology could see him try and forge connections with Iran.

References

Bibliography

*
*

{{DEFAULTSORT:Musingku, Noah
Papua New Guinean politicians
Bougainvillean independence activists
People from the Autonomous Region of Bougainville
Heads of state of states with limited recognition
Self-proclaimed monarchy
Bougainvillean activists