Preparedness by Press Release: Marape's Drought Plan Arrives After the Forecast

By PAUL L. KEBAIJA

When a government announces it is "preparing" for a disaster that climate agencies flagged months ago, the announcement itself becomes the evidence of how unprepared it is.

Prime Minister James Marape's 21 June directive ordering every province and district to brace for an "extraordinary" dry season is being presented as decisive leadership. Read more carefully, it is a confession. A nation that genuinely planned for El Niño does not issue instructions to "be prepared" while the conditions are already developing across the tropical Pacific. It executes a plan that already exists.

There is no plan. The release says so plainly: the Prime Minister has given the Central Government "the next two weeks" to come up with a national strategy. In late June 2026, with forecasters warning El Niño will persist through the second half of the year, the country's drought response is a fortnight from being drafted. That is not foresight. That is a deadline set after the starting gun.

This matters because Papua New Guinea has been here before, and the memory should be searing. The 2015–2016 El Niño drought pushed millions into food and water insecurity, shut schools, dried rivers to dust, and killed people in the Highlands through frost and hunger. Relief was late, uneven, and routed through systems that buckled under the load. The entire point of surviving that catastrophe was to build standing capacity so the next El Niño and there is always a next one would not catch the state flat-footed. A decade on, the official response is to ask districts to start identifying their own water sources.

That brings us to the quiet sleight of hand at the centre of this release: the relentless transfer of responsibility downward. Provinces and districts must "take ownership." Communities must map their water. Local leaders must identify the vulnerable. Each phrase sounds like empowerment; stacked together they describe a National Government positioning itself to be blameless when the taps run dry. Districts already know where their water is. What they lack is money, equipment, and functioning supply systems precisely the things only the centre can resource, and precisely the things this release does not commit.

On funding, the language is revealing. Cabinet is "examining," "looking at tailoring," considering "appropriate" arrangements. Not one kina is allocated. Not one mechanism is named. For provinces whose disaster funds have a long history of arriving late, partially, or not at all, "Cabinet is examining" is not reassurance it is the sound of a decision deferred until the crisis can no longer be ignored.

Preparedness is not a sentiment, and it cannot be issued by media release. It is pre-positioned water infrastructure, funded contingency plans, early-warning systems wired into provincial administrations, and stockpiles bought before, not after, the rivers fall. By that measure the government has prepared nothing. It has merely announced its intention to begin.

"This is a time for preparedness, not panic," the Prime Minister says. He is right. The tragedy is that the time for preparedness was last year, and the year before and the government spent it waiting for the sky to confirm what the forecasters had already told it.