PNG BLOGS FORUM UP

Hi Folks, Terry here saying hi to all you guys following or reading this Blog, we now have a permanent forum site for this Blog and it is at www.pngforum.org Feel free to register and post your thoughts on issues affecting you or the country, Unlike other forums we intend to keep this forum open but personal attacks/slang will be censored, Thanks and spread the word. PNGFORUM.ORG


(Linked on the right)



T.D.BUNPAI 

Comments

Post a Comment

Please free to leave comments.

Popular posts from this blog

THE COUNTRY OF NEVER LEARN

Image
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...
Read more

Panguna is burning again, and the plan it is meant to fund is showing its cracks

Image
by M. J. PASSINGAN In the early hours of 13 September, more than 30 men armed with high-powered rifles drove into Panguna and attacked staff of Lloyds Metals and Energy Limited. Machinery was torched and a man was killed. President Ishmael Toroama responded with defiance, saying the attack would only strengthen his government's resolve to enforce its mandate to reopen the mine. His Veterans Minister, Lynus Dake Junior, went further, insisting it was not a protest or land grievance but a crime driven by greed and criminal elements. That framing is convenient, and it is incomplete. Samson Kaissy, who chairs the Panguna Landowners Interim Council and supports Toroama, said the attackers were unauthorised gold panners angry at being displaced by the mine's reopening. People losing their livelihood to a mine project is a land grievance. It is the same kind of grievance that closed Panguna in the first place, shut in 1989 amid protests over environmental damage and how the revenue ...
Read more

More bills for provinces under Feo’s higher education plan

Image
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...
Read more

Five years to deliver, and the job is killing them

Image
  by MICHAEL J. PASSINGAN Heart attacks and strokes form the clearest pattern in the deaths of PNG’s MPs. Maprik MP Gabriel Kapris died of a sudden heart attack in Port Moresby in August 2023. A month later, Dei MP Steven Pim was pronounced dead on arrival at Pacific International Hospital after a heart attack. In February 2024, Education Minister Jimmy Uguro died in his sleep in a Wewak hotel, with doctors suspecting cardiac arrest, after a full day of official school visits. In the previous Parliament, high blood pressure was given as the cause for Goilala MP William Samb, and a stroke for North Bougainville MP William Nakin. Not every death fits. Deputy Prime Minister Sam Basil was killed in a head-on crash on the Bulolo Highway. Kerema MP Richard Mendani was lost to COVID-19. Sir Julius Chan was 85 and had been ill for a long time. Cancer took Sir Mekere Morauta, and Maso Karipe died under treatment in Brisbane after a year-long illness. The cardiac cluster still points at some...
Read more

No Clan to Feed: Why Enga Lost Its Outsider Commander

Image
By Peter Parakisan Sir John Pundari cannot bury his own father in Kompiam-Ambum. The old man lies in Port Moresby because the Member was chased off his ground. That is the measure of the man now moving police commanders around Enga ahead of 2027. Chief Superintendent Steven Harris lasted about ten months as provincial police commander. He was sworn into the Royal PNG Constabulary, Australian, with no clan to feed. Commissioner David Manning sold that as the point: no provincial connection that could compromise him. Governor Sir Peter Ipatas had spent eight years getting that kind of officer into Wabag. In late September the same Commissioner signed the paper that sent Harris to Kimbe and put Acting Superintendent Daniel Yangen in the chair. No reason was published. The Enga Provincial Assembly asked for the transfer to be revoked. Ipatas warned that the timing, with the general election already in sight, put a fragile peace at risk. The handover went ahead anyway. The name on the d...
Read more

THE MAN WHO WANTS TO BE PRIME MINISTER

Image
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...
Read more

The Kina Didn't Fall. It Was Pushed, So Who Signed Off on Your Shrinking Kina?

Image
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...
Read more