PNGBLOGS

by MICHAEL J. PASSINGAN Southern Highlands Governor William Powi wants voters to know he has ambition. Explaining in The National on 23 September why he never founded a party, he said this should not be mistaken for a lack of ability, vision or “leadership ambition”. In the same statement he urged the province’s leaders to unite so its priorities reach whatever government forms after 2027, and asked his critics to stick to facts. Under section 63 of the Organic Law on the Integrity of Political Parties and Candidates, the Governor-General must invite the party with the most MPs to form government after an election. That rule does not apply to a vote of no confidence. A governor without a party of his own has no claim on the first route. His path to the top runs through someone else’s party or through the floor of Parliament, and on both routes the currency is a bloc of votes. A united Southern Highlands bench, the governor plus five open members, is six of them. Unity has been his li...

by MICHAEL J. PASSINGAN Higher Education Minister Kinoka Feo wants 500,000 tertiary places. The Unggai-Bena MP, who took the portfolio from Don Polye in July 2024, said this week the country has about 25,000 now, and that Gulf, Central, East Sepik and Oro have signed partnerships to take higher learning into the provinces. He tabled no budget, no timeline and not a single costed institution. In May, breaking ground for a West Sepik college at Poro, Aitape, Feo spoke of 500,000 to 600,000 places. In 2021, DHERST's then acting secretary Francis Hualupmomi reported spaces had grown from 12,000 to 15,000, with a prime ministerial directive to reach 30,000 within five to ten years. Five years on, the minister's own count of 25,000 still falls short of that modest goal, and the goal has been multiplied more than sixteen-fold. Five hundred thousand places, in programmes that mostly run three to four years, means between 125,000 and 167,000 new entrants every year. In 2025, more tha...

by MICHAEL JOSEPH PASSINGAN Australia signed a K27.2 million grant with Telikom this week so the state-owned telco can sort out how it runs itself. A 2025 Australian tender, issued while the grant was in preparation, records that one of Telikom's two billing platforms had already reached end of life. That is where Papua New Guinea's own telecommunications company stands in 2026: needing a foreign grant to fix its back office. Telikom's homepage still carries the line "Connecting the Unconnected in rural Papua New Guinea." It has never come close. Before the market opened to competition, PNG's telephone access was among the lowest in the world, according to the regulator's universal access fund. Telikom was the only operator until 2007. In 2006 its mobile subsidiary had about 100,000 subscribers, most of them in Port Moresby. Digicel did the connecting instead. It arrived in 2007, took mobile penetration from 1.6 per cent in 2006 to about 45 per cent by 20...

by PAUL L. KEBAIJA Petroleum Minister Jimmy Maladina wants Papua New Guineans to win more jobs, training and contracts from Papua LNG. So does every landowner in Gulf and Central. The difference is that Maladina holds the pen on the instruments that decide those outcomes, and after Thursday's benefit-sharing signing he offered a wish list instead of a plan. A national content plan for this project has been promised since 2019. That August, after the NEC review of the O'Neill-era gas agreement, then Petroleum Minister Kerenga Kua announced that Total would prepare a detailed plan with the Department of Petroleum and Energy. In October 2022 the minister had still not signed it off. In 2023 TotalEnergies said it would hand one over that September. Seven years on, and weeks from a final investment decision, the minister who approves that plan is still describing what it ought to contain. If an approved plan exists, he should publish it, with hiring and procurement targets and pena...

by PAUL L. KEBAIJA Augustine Mano will not be on a ballot paper in 2027, and no electorate can remove him. He has run the Mineral Resources Development Company since March 2008, under Somare, O'Neill and Marape. MRDC is wholly owned by the State, its accounts are tabled by the Prime Minister, and on its own figures it manages K14.5 billion in assets for landowners and provincial governments in the mining and petroleum provinces. He also chairs the Southern Highlands and Gulf provincial health boards. The chairman who signs for both sides Mano has been a director of PNG Air since 2010 and its chairman since 2020. On 31 March 2026 he signed its 2025 accounts. MRDC is the airline's largest shareholder. PNG Air carries K243.6 million in accumulated losses, finished 2025 with liabilities exceeding assets by K12.9 million, and has had its shares suspended on the PNGX since January 2019 for failing to report on time. The same accounts show who is paying for its new fleet. In 2025 t...

by PAUL L. KEBAIJA Gulf Province has signed the agreement that fixes how much of Papua LNG's royalties, equity and development levy it will share with Central. It did so before anyone has settled which Gulf clans are entitled to that money. Petroleum Minister Jimmy Maladina called Thursday's Tier 1 signing a major milestone. For Gulf's landowners it is a ceiling. Tier 1 is not a side deal. Under the forum's Operational Rule No. 1, no Tier 2 to Tier 5 allocation could be negotiated until the facilitators declared Tier 1 settled. The split it records becomes the common allocation framework for royalty, equity and development levy in every tier that follows. Every kina the Gulf clans fight over in the coming weeks has already been sized by this signature, and Gulf's landowner representatives sat on the provincial negotiating team that agreed to it. Gulf went into those talks with a hard position. On 15 September, Acting Governor Morris Taudevin told the forum the pr...

by PAUL L. KEBAIJA At Bank South Pacific's counter today, K5,000 buys US$936.50 in cash. Sent by telegraphic transfer, it buys US$1,083.50. At the end of 2022, the same K5,000 was worth about US$1,420 at the official rate. That slide was not an accident of the market. It was policy, and the people paying for it were never asked. The kina does not float. The Bank of PNG sets it against the US dollar under what it calls a crawl-like arrangement, and it has walked the currency down since April 2023, the month after the IMF approved PNG's loan programme. The kina closed 2023 at US$0.2683, fell 6.8 per cent through 2024, and now sits near US$0.224, about 21 per cent below where it stood at the end of 2022. At a Lae investment forum in 2024, ANZ's institutional banking director Edwin Shankar put it plainly: "The Kina depreciation has come about as a result of the International Monetary Fund loan." The official defence is that the kina was overvalued. The central bank...

by PAUL L. KEBAIJA Bank of Papua New Guinea Governor Elizabeth Genia told the Transparency International PNG anti-money laundering conference at Apec Haus on 30 September that illicit funds move through banks, remitters, foreign exchange dealers, real estate, and the lawyers, accountants and company service providers. In the same speech she assured those sectors that naming them was not blaming them for the grey listing. If the channels are not at fault, and the laws have just been fixed, the obvious question is who is. Wilson Onea, director of BPNG's own Financial Analysis and Supervision Unit, told a panel at the same conference that most of the risks in the 2026 national risk assessment were already there in 2017, and that law enforcement, regulatory and policy capacity had not changed since. "Our core vulnerability is execution, and not legislation," he said. Nine years of the same risks and the same capacity is not a drafting problem. It is a choice about prioritie...