by KEVIN PAMBA
A proud owner
MOSES Tulah considers himself lucky.
He has recently received the title to 71.6ha of his traditional
land at the Amele area of Madang province.
Now he thinks he can venture into business and use his land more
profitably.
This Madang man is an exceptional Papua New Guinean. He did what
so many others have feared doing.
Land registration has been feared by Papua New Guineans after
hearing from the anti-land mobilisation lobby that the exercise
means giving up land to State control.
Tulah has not been swayed by this campaign.
His journey to register his land began in 1990. That was when he
decided to quit his young career with Air Niugini in Port Moresby
to return home to Amele.
He has since been living on his land. While at home, Tulah began
to identify the traditional boundaries and heard from his father
and immediate relatives about their land.
One of the major hurdles was to get other families off his land
and that meant having many months of court cases over land
disputes.
When he did get the clearance from the courts, he began the
arduous process of registering his land with the Department of
Lands. This process meant hiring a Lands Surveyor.
He did and 71.6ha were identified and surveyed.
With the surveyed map of his land, Tulah put together his land
registration application and sent it to Port Moresby.
Many months and years passed and in 2004, Tulah’s story was
published in this column that he was about to get land
registration confirmed.
At the time, Tulah said the result of his application was only
several months away.
But the bureaucratic wheels at times do turn slowly and three
years went by without any response from Port Moresby. After couple
of trips to the national capital, Tulah went home a proud man
recently.
He came back with a title to his land.
Last month, Tulah took The National on a tour of parts of his now
registered land. And what an investment it is – a huge block of
land covered with lush tropical vegetation with an abundance of
flora and fauna not far south of Madang town along the Amele road.
Tulah and his extended family live on the southwestern edge of the
land along the Amele road.
There are few other families and a SDA church still using small
portions of his land.
Tulah beamed with excitement that he is now a proud owner of a
huge chunk of land that he will manage on behalf of the extended
Tulah family.
There are several things he wants to do on his now registered
customary land.
First on the cards is a chicken farm, housing 50,000 chickens to
supply the Rural Development Bank-funded abattoir and processing
plant currently under construction at Matukar on the North Coast
of Madang. He plans to be a major breeder and supplier of chicken
to the Matukar plant.
For this, he is working on a bank loan. He also plans to connect
his land with power that passes through from the Yonki Hydro to
Madang town not far at Four Mile along the Madang-Ramu Highway.
With the chicken farm going ahead and the electricity connected,
Tulah plans to put up other development projects on his land,
depending on what is worthwhile and viable. For now, Tulah is a
hugely relieved man, having his long held dream fulfilled.
For him and the extended Tulah family, the sky is the limit for
what they can do with a registered land since this is one of the
prerequisite for modern business and development.
Tulah believes with their registered land, opportunities abound,
given that the land is located about 15 minutes by road out of
Madang town and also a along a major road network linking the
rural Madang with the provincial capital.
