Is Telikom Buying EMTV and NAU FM To Create a Government Propaganda Unit to Win the 2017 Election for PNC and Peter O’Neill?

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For months the O’Neill government through its mouthpiece Ben Micah and confirmed by the Prime Minister himself, has said that the government cannot afford to keep subsidising Air Niugini and PNG Power Ltd. They presented this argument as their strongest rationale for wanting to offload at least 49% of those operations to private shareholders. So what’s going on with Telikom?

From an investment standpoint, Telikom is a no brainer. No private investor in their right mind would sink money into a state owned enterprise that they don’t expect to get a healthy profit from. Amongst all PNG SOEs, Telikom is one of the least attractive investment propositions, which is why the government is not even bothering to put it up for sale right now. In the world of competition, Telikom is legendary for constantly missing the boat. It lost out on both the mobile phone and the internet waves. Its data modems required special registration and instructions few people could follow, while a Digicel modem could be bought in many locations, including weekends, and was plug and play, simple as that.

Telikom is much like the hopelessly incompetent Post PNG which it used to be part of. Post PNG now takes weeks to get a simple letter from one of its few PNG post offices to another part of the country because fewer people are sending letters and PNG Post won’t send any of them to another destination until it fills up a bag to put on the plane. It charges more for overseas express mail service than private competitors, yet PNG Post pretends it is on top of things.

Telikom is like Post PNG in that it operates on the cargo cult assumption that all you have to do to grow revenue is first create advertisements in which you confidently state you provide good service. Once the advertisements come out, Telikom/PNG Post be believe all problems will magically be corrected and long lines of new customers will form at the doors.

With all the negatives that currently go with the brand label PNG Telikom, there’s no question why Telikom is not up for sale along with PNG Power Ltd and Air Niugini. The mystery is why the O’Neill government says it has no money to support SOEs anymore, Telikom is still losing money, yet the O’Neill government gave Telikom this year enough money to buy Datec from Steamships (owned by the British Swires company) and now it has the money to make another big purchase: EM-TV and NAU FM 100.

Telikom’s newest intended acquisition is actually the Fijian owned Media Niugini Ltd, which owns both operations and also some minor assets. Telikom says that it wants to take possession before the end of the year so there is motivation to complete this acquisition quickly, which means the purchase price will be much higher to the government.

Telikom is playing secret about what percent of Media Niugini Ltd they want to buy, but obviously they want it all, since that is the only way Telikom can achieve its stated objective of “being able to extend our offering beyond voice and data services to include content along with FM100 business unit to the PNG market.” This cannot happen unless Telikom has clear majority ownership of the company and can control the content fully.

From its side, the Fijians who own Media Niugini Ltd don’t seem interested (or maybe they don’t believe) all the talk about how much the LNG project is going to boost the PNG economy. The Fijians say they’re willing to divest everything and get the hell out of PNG.

Buying EMTV and NAU FAM would need regulatory approvals by the PNG government, especially since this would give Telikom a monopoly on television signals and nearly a monopoly in radio. Democracies in the 21st Century would never tolerate that kind of government control. Unfortunately the PNG government’s regulatory mechanisms have become hopelessly corrupted. The prospects of the O’Neill government saying no to its own Telikom’s acquisition plan is effectively nil.

Telikom PNG chief executive officer Michael Donnelly expressed his hope that Telikom would be buying more businesses to put under its umbrella. One wonders where all the money is coming from since government sources say that the government’s 2014 budget was overshot months ago and the country is dangerously close to running out of funds. Remember that the reason why SOE Telikom was not offered for sale is that it financial prospects look so poor. It has been a failure in the world of competition.

The government’s support of Telikom’s buying spree doesn’t make sense until one ceases to rationalise from the standpoint of projected profits and losses. Dig deeper, think about the O’Neill government’s decisions over the past 2 years related to holding onto political power at any cost and the Telikom affair starts to look logical.
The Telikom television and radio acquisition add to what it already owns through NBC. The result is total control of television and nearly total control of the radio waves. This represents a powerful delivery system to promote messages that make the government look good.

You would not expect good investigative stories as EMTV reporter Scott Waide often prepares to remain under a Peter O’Neill controlled EMTV. Just as the Rimbunan Hijau-owned National has never allowed any stories on logging in PNG that would make RH and its operations look bad, so too would government-owned EMTV and NAU FM be strongly tempted, if not outright planning to prohibit stories that made the government look bad. A subtle censorship touch is most effective because it won’t be noticed by the public.

Controlling the television and radio media would give the O’Neill government clear oversight over competitor’s political advertisements come the 2017 election. Peter O’Neill has convincingly demonstrated several times already that it is unimportant to him to spend within budget limits. It would not be unexpected to find the television and airwaves filled with pro-PNC propaganda before the 2017 election, and even next year we start seeing many stories about government accomplishments and nothing about government failures.

If the acquisition of EMTV and NAU FM100 goes through as planned, O’Neill’s People’s National Congress stands an excellent chance of wiping out all competing parties in the 2017 election and become PNG’s only political party with Peter O’Neill at the helm.

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