Less Planning More Action

Papua New Guinea anticipates exponential growth in the next few years as many resource projects come into production.

Where does it anticipate spending the bulk of that new found wealth?
Government has given us its strategic pillars where much of the money is going to be spent. They will be in universal primary education, in basic health, in infrastructure, in tackling law and order and in growing the economy.

They are indeed strategic but they need now to be broken down to far more specific areas for far concentrated effort.

For let us not forget that the above strategic pillars of development have been every administration’s priority development goals since 1975.

Yet despite growing budgets, including contributions from donor sources, key social and economic indicators in the country remain depressed and in real terms have regressed.

Child and maternal mortality remain the highest in the Asia Pacific region. Access to schools, doctors and medicine and to clean water is negligible and there is singular apathy towards correcting the situation.
The majority of Papua New Guineans remain outside the measureable wealth creation activities in the country. Their efforts in subsistence agriculture and in the informal sector never rate a mention when the Gross Domestic Product is compiled.

So what seems to have gone wrong?

A good guide is the country’s performance as regards the millennium development goals. Are we on track, off track, early achievers or lost in some mire of our own making?

By around 2008, PNG was off track with CO2 emissions; rural sanitation coverage; the proportion of children underweight; rural access to clean water; child mortality and infantility was poor; and maternal mortality is in the highest brackets in the Asia Pacific .

Rapid economic growth has had its environmental costs including deforestation and destruction of wetlands and extensive pollution of water ways. PNG is one country with so negative a rating in this area and one which it needs to get serious about as many of its low lying atolls such as the Carterets Atolls and Duke of York islands are about to be engulfed by rising water levels.

PNG performs poorly in providing its rural populations with access to safe water and basic sanitation. In urban centres its public service delivery systems are struggling to keep pace with rapidly growing urban populations.

The country was performing poorly in education but with the O’Neill government policy of free education, it is felt that area is not as insurmountable as it once appeared. Other areas need similar saturation approach, particularly in the area of primary health.

PNG is trending upwards with women empowerment but much more needs to be done in a country where male dominance in the household and decision making still has a stranglehold.

Poverty rating is really difficult to measure in PNG. In terms of access to cash income, PNG would rate among the poorest, but in terms of access to food and necessity and to ownership of land and resources, Papua New Guineans are among the richest.

Despite adequate supply of food, lack of sanitation, hygiene and good nutritional information has resulted in high malnutrition in many parts of the country and food related health problems.

HIV remains a major concern but high concentration of awareness coupled with deep penetration of anti-retroviral treatment has produced excellent results as reported by the National AIDS Council recently.
Other health problems, particularly in the preventable and curable diseases areas, are tragically in desperate need of attention. Malaria and pneumonia are still among the highest killers. TB, polio and leprosy which were once thought to have been eradicated are now re-emerging with the worrying concern that the germs are mutating into forms that might avoid treatment and many drug resistant varieties are already emerging.
What PNG is lacking is not planning, it is application. It does not need policy pillars, it needs implementation machinery. It has over arching strategies but it lacks their translation to nitty-gritty programmes.
It has over zealous policy and law makers and a lackadaisical civil service sector which needs to be revved into very high gear to match.

Unless that is done, no amount of money big or bigger, will matter much. It will just get sucked into the void of corruption in the same manner as about K100 billion in budgets passed to date.

OP/ED

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