Grey-Listed, Gun-Ridden, and Still Feeding time, Handing Out Titles.


Grey-Listed, Gun-Ridden, and Still Feeding time, Handing Out Titles.

by PAUL L. KEBAIJA

Papua New Guinea turned 51 on 16 September. The next morning, two more vice-ministers were sworn in: Porgera-Paiela MP Gidron Maso Karipe for Petroleum and Usino-Bundi MP Vincent Kumura to assist the Prime Minister. James Marape called it mentoring. He also raised, before anyone else could, the question of why it was happening only months before an election.

Here is the answer Waigani will not give. With the 2027 poll less than a year away, a vice-ministry is one more way to keep an MP fed, loyal and inside the government camp. Titles and allowances for the backbench as the writs approach are the oldest tool in PNG coalition management.

The table is well laid. On the latest published Salaries and Remuneration Commission schedule, a vice-minister's base salary is K126,272, against K105,343 for a backbencher. Add the bigger housing, vehicle, driver and entertainment allowances and the title is worth roughly K99,000 a year on top of an ordinary MP's package, before up to eight extra return flights home. At least eleven MPs have been sworn in as vice-ministers since October 2024.

So what has all this extra help in government delivered?

Since February, PNG has sat on the Financial Action Task Force grey list of countries under increased monitoring for weak defences against money laundering and terrorist financing. At the June plenary PNG deferred reporting, so the listing stands. Banks dealing with PNG now have to factor that into their risk checks.

Corruption is not easing either. PNG's score on Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index fell from 31 to 26 out of 100 in the 2025 index. Transparency International PNG ties the slide to the electoral cycle and wants safeguards in place before 2027.

Crime has not waited for the mentors. Before dawn on 2 September, ten armed men stopped a security convoy on a Port Moresby road and took 25 gold bars, a million kina in cash and the guards' guns. Police said they had not been told the shipment was moving. Two weeks later they were still asking the public to help find four suspects.

In the Highlands, tribal fighting has become a market. ANU researchers writing for the Lowy Institute in May described hired gunmen bankrolled by politicians, businessmen and elites, with police stations abandoned and district offices closed across much of the Upper Highlands. Elections, they warned, are when the money for that violence peaks.

That is the country the next election will be fought in, and MPs already hold the purse closest to voters. Each district receives about K20 million a year through DSIP and the District Infrastructure Program, spent on the approval of a board the local MP chairs. ACT NOW!'s 2026 DDA Watch report found only 12 of 96 districts have published their five-year plans. Between 2017 and 2025, the Auditor-General audited Service Improvement Program funds just six times across nearly 500 eligible bodies. Voters will be asked to re-elect people whose spending they cannot see.

None of this needs another vice-minister. It needs the FATF action plan delivered on time, an Auditor-General funded to audit every district, police who can hold ground in the Highlands, and district spending published line by line. Not one of those comes with a swearing-in ceremony.

Marape's Independence Hill message was one word: work. "All of us must work," he said after the swearing-in. Papua New Guineans are still waiting to see whose work he meant, and who is being fed while they wait.

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Tomorrow on the Weekend Series is our gangstar govna, Semin William Titipe Powi, the first knight of Nipa, the gun slinger, the man with many titles, have a nice weekend.😂

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