THE FIRST STEP TO RID THE ROT AND CORRUPTION AT THE NATIONAL HOUSING CORPORATION (NHC)

A Personal Opinion Addressed to the Minister for Housing and Urbanisation

by BEN NEGINTS
I commend the Minister for Housing and Urbanisation Hon. John Kaupa for coming out in the Media and frankly stating his desire to fix the problems at NHC. In this post I would like to express my opinion to the Minister in both my capacity as a Citizen and a dissatisfied service provider owed several hundreds of thousands of Kinas for services rendered to NHC since 2015.

Majority of the last four years (2012 to 2016) I have witnessed NHC as a ship sailing without the guidance of a capable Captain at the helm. Being handpicked by the former Minister for Housing and Urbanisation, the previous Managing Director Mr. John Dege was an absolute disaster for NHC and its Stakeholders. Not only did he NOT possess the qualifications and experiences necessary to run a Corporate Organisation but importantly he lacked the moral and ethical decency to make him accountable and trustworthy to hold a Public Office.

During Mr. Dege’s tenure as MD for NHC, the Organisation instead of fulfilling its key Mission of Providing Affordable Housing for PNG Citizens was uninhibitedly disposing properties at an average of two sales per day (as one insider at NHC pointed out) and massive evictions of Tenants rendering many homeless, broken-hearted and destitute. NHC was turned into a Cash-Cow for Mr. Dege and his army of low and moral-depleted Wantoks and staff feasting from the Affluent buyers who splashed big commissions and bribes on top of the deflated sales prices.

I must point out here that the result of Mr. Dege’s mismanagements and abuse of public office over the years had not only suffered the poor Tenants and depleted State Assets belonging to the people of PNG but also had left NHC currently with:

(1) Huge debts worth millions of Kinas owed to disgruntled service providers and creditors like myself;

(2) Failed Housing projects such as the Duran Farm due to misappropriation and lack of management foresight and planning;

(3) Rundown of NHC properties in towns and cities throughout PNG: An abysmal sight and eyesore for the Public;

(4) An underperforming and ineffective army of NHC staff who do not know their own Job Descriptions and getting paid for doing nothing or doing the wrong thing;

(5) A dysfunctional and incoherent Unit Managers that exist within NHC who do not know how to leverage resources and functions to achieve the desired goals and objectives of NHC;

(6) An insurmountable accounts receivables/debts in outstanding tenancy rentals because there are no proper accounting systems in place.

(7) And the list goes on…

From what I have listed above, it is without question that Mr. Kaupa and NHC Board and Management need a good and a responsible Captain to steer the Organisation out of the present conditions. The incumbent Acting MD Mr. Ditha Morris, in my personal opinion, is the right person to lead NHC out of its current predicament. He should be given the resources and permanency of Position as the MD to pursue what the good Minister wants to achieve for the Housing and Urbanisation Department and for NHC to operate as a self-sustaining Organisation.

Mr. Morris took office as the Acting MD in late November 2016. I have no relationship with him but I know him from a distant, reading about his work and efforts from the Media in the last six or seven months and also as a former student colleague at Unitech in the late 1990s. I remember him doing a Degree Program in either Building or Architecture Department. NHC with its outstanding and long overdue housing and urbanisation projects in PNG needs someone with the Building and Architecture credentials to lead the organisation forward and so I believe he is qualified. He also is a very experienced Builder/Architecture through past jobs he may have held and his role as a former Board Member for NHC; something very vital to salvage NHC. I believe during his tenure as Board Member he would have observed internal strengths and weaknesses and the external opportunities and threats that NHC as an organisation faced over the years.

If Minister Kapua is seriously talking about fixing NHC then he should start addressing the problem from the Top down. And that is to appoint Mr. Ditha Morris as the MD and equip him with resources. To be honest, NHC is a rundown organisation that should be considered bankrupt and failed had it not been a State Entity. I have seen it operating on a “hand to mouth” principle so the good Minister after appointing Mr. Morris as MD should adequately fund the Ship and the Captain with resources.

Some critics will say that Mr. Morris is the incumbent and partially responsible for the mess at NHC. Those critics need to know that he was thrown into the Position as an Acting MD only seven months ago that was already fraught with the filths and rots created by Mr. Dege and his associates. Also those critics need to know that Mr. Morris took over the reign of an organisation that was bankrupt and was unable to even pay its staff wages let alone pay suppliers and service providers to foster a way forward. Therefore I reiterate here that the Hon Minister must adequately fund NHC to foster the way forward.

AND apart from the qualifications stated above, for fair dinkum sake, Mr. Morris is a Morobean and a Momasian and therefore should be given the chance to continue as NHC Boss. I am a Western Highlander and I must state here with a sense of guilt that it’s not fair seeing the dominance of Highlanders as Heads of Government Departments and State Owned Enterprises. PNG needs to be well represented both in the distribution of Government Ministries and Heads of Departments and SOEs so give Mr. Morris a chance. In my next post, as a keen observing Citizen (and of course a disgruntled creditor), I will outline some steps NHC should undertake to be resuscitated from the current mess.