MILLIONS LOST THROUGH LACK of ACCOUNTABILITY

 

HOW PNG LOSES UNACCOUNTED BILLIONS TO SELFISH POLITICS

By DANIEL KUMBON in WABAG

PAPUA New Guinea is probably the only country in the world which wastes unaccounted for billions when incomplete projects are ignored after members of parliament who initiated them lose their seats in the elections.

Newly elected leaders tended to start their own new projects and ignored those which were left incomplete by their predecessors as if they were latrine pits in their backyards.

They didn’t seem to care if millions of kina in public funds had been spent on the projects intended to benefit the same people whom he now represented in parliament.

Many leaders forgot that the next member would ignore his projects once he lost his seat. This is selfish politics which paved the way for the vicious cycle of wastage to continue in PNG.

This is not to mention projects that are completely destroyed or abandoned due to tribal warfare, criminal activities or when people make exuberant compensation demands.

Contractors also joined in the rot when they were paid at inflated rates while other unscrupulous companies abandoned projects midway and ran with the money.

Nobody in Waigani seemed to care, not one question was even asked why a member wanted to start new projects when there were enough incomplete projects in his electorate to worry about.

There was no shortage of abandoned incomplete projects scattered right across the country.  Enga province has its fair share of sorry-looking structures which have been left to decay. Here are some examples from three districts.

The Kandep Rural Police Station at Lakis village on the turn-off to Wage is one such project which had been started by Jimson Sauk. It was left to decay when he was defeated by Don Polye during the 2002 national elections.

The people of Lakis can be excused for making good use of the eight permanent buildings intended for policemen. They have used them as their private homes for the last 16 years.

Jimson Sauk also initiated the nearby Murip High Altitude Rice project with help from the Chinese government but it was completely destroyed during election violence between political rivals and their supporters. The skeletons of burnt out farm machines and twisted iron posts is all that remained there.

Up in Laiagam, another rural police station which stands abandoned is located at Mapumanda village. It is one of many multimillion kina projects Mr Philip Kikala initiated soon after he defeated Opis Papo in 2002.

But when Kikala lost to Dickson Mangape in 2012 many of his projects like the Rural Development Bank building in Laiagam town, the Correctional Institution staff houses, the nearby Mamale Technical Institute, the Laiagam Hydro Power Project and chicken factory at Aiyak village have all been ignored.

In 2017, Mr Kikala contested the Lagaip Porgera seat again hoping to revive the projects but his luck did not hold. Soon after, he was jailed for seven years after the national court found him guilty of misappropriating public funds.

But one wonders if this punishment could have been dished out to him if he had won both the 2012 and the 2017 national elections. This raises a pertinent question: Just how many leaders covered up their tracks and pretended they were good with help from equally corrupt public servants?

More examples of incomplete projects also abound in Wabag district after Sam Abal lost his seat in 2012. Some of the most notable were the state of the art main Wabag Town Market, a vegetable marketing depot and a multi-million kina chicken factory which were aimed solely to put money into the pockets of village people.

The chicken factory was established at a cost of over K23 million. The construction was supervised by experts from McAlpine, the New Zealand company that was supplying the freezers which were capable of holding 80,000 tons of meat birds.

The factory was going to process 1000 chickens an hour 24 hours a day for 52 weeks of the year. The freezer room was to hold 20,000 processed chicken at any one time.

Up to 6,000 people were registered with the Investment Promotion Authority (IPA) to grow chicken as a business. Bank accounts were also being opened for all of them.

The chicken factory entirely depended on a good road network system. So K7 million was used to build trunk and feeder roads to enable farmers in outlying villages to grow chicken to sell to the factory.

A further K3 million was spent on the Maramuni road to enable people there to bring low altitude fruits, vegetables and spices to sell at the Vegetable Marketing depot.

A new government station was being built at Lakolam where a tribal war had scattered the people beginning in the 1970s. Construction of a new police station, DPI station and a Health Centre were underway. The people began to resettle and continue to live there in peace today.

These happy people can be seen selling freshly roasted parrots known as ‘iraliu maliu’ in the Enga language on the highway there. A church has been built there while the children walk freely to the nearby school every day.

But the Lakolam government station and all the other projects started by Sam Abal have remained incomplete, abandoned and rejected in the last five years.

Sam Abal was in the top seat as acting Prime Minister and chaired NEC meetings. He saw how much village people were ignored and trampled on by politicians who he said only aimed for the LNG and other resource projects to grab what they could to enrich themselves.

He warned that the time to rescue PNG from greed and widespread corruption was in 2012. The projects he had initiated were aimed to ensure that the ‘grassroots’ people had money in their pockets earned by themselves through their own hard work. He wanted to see the people enjoy life and eradicate poverty through the projects he initiated.

He had accumulated the funds both from national and district support grants to build the projects in Wabag some of which he said were very hard to establish. He had to fight many hurdles mostly bureaucratic red tape to actually get them off the ground.

He realised that prosperity and happiness would come only if there was peace. So he introduced his popular ‘Lusim Gun, Holim Sapol’ policy. At the time, there were 18 clans involved in tribal warfare in Wabag alone. Hundreds of people died and property worth millions of kina was destroyed.

But peace returned and people began to enjoy total peace for seven years as the people began to take ownership of the law and order policy and embraced it tightly.

This unprecedented peaceful period ensured that there were uninterrupted classes in all primary, community and elementary schools in Wabag and remained open all year round. Up to 3000 students from 21 primary schools freely participated in the popular Schools Soccer Tournament.

One highlight was the selection of an Under 12 soccer team – 10 boys and two girls to New Caledonia in 2008. For most of them it was their first time to even see Port Moresby. Sam Abal intended to expose more young people to the outside world.

At the time, all aid posts, health centres and hospitals in Wabag were operating and the people had easy access to health services which had enough medicine, many times more than any other district in the province.

Abal predicted that when the LNG project began production in 2014, the economy of PNG would explode. Goods bought then with K2 would cost K5 and as a result most people in the country who were not prepared would live below the poverty line. He didn’t want to see his people live like beggars. He wanted them to raise chickens and plant vegetables to benefit from the economic boom.

“That’s why I am slowly but surely building Wabag with steel and concrete laying a solid economic foundation that is firm and secure based on education and agriculture for the sustenance of future generations,” he said.

However, he must have somehow sensed that he might lose his seat when he added: “If elections can be won based on performance, respect, honesty and personal character I would be returned to parliament unopposed like the people of Wabag did to my late father in 1968.”

Late Sir Tei Abal, considered one of the founding fathers was sent to parliament by a mere Wabag Local Government Council resolution. He was again re-elected twice more with an absolute majority until he died of a stroke in 1994.

Sam Abal the one time acting prime minister realised that the era in which his father had excelled in politics was different.  It was a time when people went for quality leadership.  

Despite his efforts, he lost the seat to Robert Ganim. Sam Abal again unsuccessfully contested the seat in 2017 which saw Dr Lino Tom win.

And so it seems that the multi-million kina projects Sam Abal, Philip Kikala and other losing members initiated will continue to stand silent like the mysterious moai statues on Easter Island out there in the vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean.

Add all the funds spent on abandoned projects in every part of PNG and see where the total figure stands at.

No wonder the country is cash starved, rundown and ill prepared for even natural disasters when it should be sleeping on stacks of cash flowing in from its rich resource projects.