SPORTS DEVELOPMENT AFTER 2015 PACIFIC GAMES

by CHRISTOPHER  PAPIALI

The man who dethroned Lady Carol Kidu in the Port Moresby South electorate is said to be doing more in his electorate while others may refute this claim but generally the public seem to relate well with this first time politician, whom many referred to as PNG Gardener in which his popular TV shows on EMTV were relatively influential in his political campaign during the 2012 National Elections.

He is Hon. Justin Thatchenko, Minister for Sports and the 2015 XV Pacific Games. This is the very ministry that previous successive governments failed to give more allocations in their yearly national budgets.  

This first time politician promised to deliver the 2015 XV Pacific Games on record time, opposing his critics and the passion he has to grow sports in PNG is welcome.

Sports Development is a dead issue for the past three decades and the decades of negligence has resulted in zero sporting facilities in rural communities with absolutely dysfunctional sporting bodies in provincial towns and negative attitude to peoples’ inclusive responsiveness to it warrants the Sports Minister to act if it means demanding for more funding in the life of this current government in the next three years.

The general public especially the sporting organizations, individuals and administrators see Hon. Justin Thatchenko, as a saviour for they all know he will broker dead log of sports development proposals of the community based organizations that have been turned down by the previous Governments.

However, some MPs are sponsoring teams and individuals but largely that is done on ad hoc basis without sustainability with primary focus to marketing potential sporting personalities or a sporting group at the international scene.

The priority of any MP is to draw and plan achievable outcomes that their electorates can appreciate and particularly putting money into sports is the right thing to do. So MPs like Hon. Justin Thatchenko is very determined to revive sports in his electorate and that level of enthusiasm is obvious in his ministry.

Under his ministry the O’Neill/Dion government seeing the importance of the Pacific Games this July pumped in record funding of over K1.2 billion. The funding into the infrastructure development and into other critical areas of sports personnel training are indications of the O’Neill/Dion government’s political rule maturity in which there is no time for empty promises but actions speaking louder than words.

Therefore, credit to this government for seeing the importance of the Pacific Games and sports in general in Papua New Guinea. This country especially the city of Port Moresby has some of the best sporting facilities that other Pacific countries do not have and we should demonstrate our financial strength by continuing to invest in sports after the Pacific Games end.

It is the sustainability aspect of our infrastructure and sporting codes and personnel interest that precede over the political decisions in which the latter would benefit the few and this in effect is against utilitarian principle where maximum benefit is for all and not minority of the population.

Human development index indicates both physical and intellectual capacities and sports accommodates  these two key components and certainly the O’Neill/Dion government  is moving in the right direction in response to the UN charters on Human Development Indicators.

PNG is moving towards gaining respect from the international community and in these efforts PNG will continue to demonstrate proliferation of international treaties so that we maximise our trade relations in order to optimise Medium Term Development Goals and PNG Vision 2050.

The spectacular 2015 XV Pacific Games will end and what will be left are the massive state of the art sporting facilities and personnel including the support staff. The question now is how we strike the balance by managing the multi million kina sporting venues and the upkeep of the sporting personnel so that we sustain their fitness and health and unceasingly exposing them to international sporting events.

PNG can learn hard lessons from Jamaica, a Caribbean country that has produced some of the astounding sporting stars in the world especially through track and field athletics. In 1995, Jamaica established the Sports Development Foundation as an independent body that looks after the development of Jamaica through sports. This nation is now reaping the rich rewards that come from an investment in sports.

The Jamaican experience suggests to us that sports has emerged as a large global industry driving other economic activities such as travel and hospitality, manufacturing, marketing, media, health and personal care.

Papua New Guineans were led to believe that their country was floating on oil and gas making it the richest country in the Pacific for the past two decades but questions have to be seriously asked whether or not tangible developments have occurred in our rural areas.  We have to also seriously ask whether we made prudent investments decisions in professional sporting personalities based overseas.

For the record, in the past two decades, we have not although we have Marcus Bai, Stanley Gene and recent handful few rugby league players based in Australia. But these sporting heroes made their way through without benefiting from the National Government’s sporting investment programs.

In fact, it is laughable when actually Fiji and other Pacific Island countries were below PNG in terms of rugby playing nations for the past decades. These small island countries who do not have a lot of resources like PNG invest more on sports because their governments know very well that through such human capacity building they will improve their country’s ratings in tourism, GDP and other development indicators.

Do we continue to stand still while Fiji is exporting high profile cream of NRL Players to the Australian rugby league market while Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Solomon Islands financing soccer players in the South American continent and European Union market? A great national shame.

We call ourselves big brother to the 21 Pacific Island countries and yet there is nothing to show in the international sporting world but the high tide of corruption that brutalizes PNG apart confronts us every day. This is pathetic. It needs to stop. PNG ought to change for the better and change comes if there is political will and having the right person in the driver’s seat towards our sporting endeavours.

The undertaking to developing professional sporting personalities is with the Minister for Sports and Pacific Games and his Committees on various sporting bodies. The overall restructure in the sporting management practise particularly with and through the consideration of developing human potential for competitive sports and professional sports override all other agendas that promote family and leisure sports notations which to certain degree has no indicative result to national development in every degree.

It is a waste of time when young men and women participating in any sporting activities in the rural areas, towns and cities when there are no incentives by the state. Many of our young people die on the fields in certain parts of the rural areas and towns because of poor medical facilities and lack of proper sporting skills.

Even worse is physical education units or courses are not properly coordinated and taught as  degree programs at our higher learning institutions and colleges.  If institutions do not have skills based sporting modules and courses this suggests that one vital component of holistic development of every student is missing.

For example a critical area of sports education is sports medicine and sports psychology because these competent areas of sports education play an important role as they determine the performance level of players on the field, team officials and managers.

Meanwhile, real results and real performance based outcome whereby our sports men and women earn their living by playing professional sports in other parts of the world is the superb feeling every individual in PNG has. This gut feeling of earning all time big money by playing professional football in the Champions Leagues, or participating in the overseas professional bouts, tennis, or any other elite well paid international championships invigorates  PNG National Government to do more. Sports people excelling to the top of the world and our government making every effort to push for this agenda binds everyone - 7 million people together for the treasure hunt.

In retrospect, our treasure hunt has been marred by continuous change of governments, policy shifts, and our key people in the National Government funded sporting offices not realigning their sporting development programs with the core overall national development paradigms.

Considering the magnitude of sporting infrastructure developments in Port Moresby in response to the XV Pacific Games, the time is right for Hon. Justin Thatchenko to formulate sporting policy that will become a blueprint for sports development and this sporting policy should become a Bill of Parliament like any other Bills that are before the parliament and eventually made an Act of Parliament.

This bill should accommodate the following points: that yearly allocation of K500 million – K900 million or more should be made available for ‘sports elite junior developments’. In this program, young children or adolescents should be identified and sent overseas for junior development trainings and clinics in the academies. For instance, for football, young players within the ages of 11 – 17 should be sent to Europe, sign binding contracts with the PNG government and those academies on the player development obligations.  The PNG juniors will fit into European lifestyle, do nothing but play and talk football. If there are 11 juniors in such development program, PNG will have 11 best footballers in the world.  This initiative should not cover football only but relatively extend to other sporting codes as well.

Secondly, more sporting managers and others should be exposed to more skills enrichment programs. We could do this by bringing in experts and conduct coaching, mentoring and refresher courses on contractual basis. Or we could send our personnel to overseas to undergo coaching and other professional sporting skills.

Thirdly, the bill should be drafted towards development at the grassroots level and this could involve partnership with communities, community based development organizations, churches, etc…Schools can be used to conduct trainings and other coaching clinics and as much as possible build sporting fields based on the community needs and provide incentives by putting certain sporting managers on paid salaries so that there is continuity of sporting activities in these rural centres.  The rural centres should align their sporting development programs with the provincial governments so that provincial governments can support them.

Finally, knowing too well that a lot of our grade 10s and 12s do not find formal employment, these school dropouts can be easily be assimilated into the communities because there are sporting activities going on and they can use their education skills for writing reports, sporting draws, interpreting sports coding rules and the Sports Ministry can identify such talent individuals to be engaged at the national level.

PNG is growing and human capacity building has to be elevated to meet UN Development Goals and PNG Vision 2050. Through sports this government and future governments, if they are serious about this country will see massive progress and it is never too late to make a start somewhere. We have started by building our spectacular state of the art sporting venues and we are asking our good Minister for Sports and 2015 XV Pacific Games to consider some of the views expressed in this column.