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Culture of squandering pinis pe I am aware of at least a dozen ex-public servants who have squandered their retirement or retrenchment pay-outs or pinis pe as they are popularly called in Tok Pisin.In some of these cases, these men have spent their lifetime’s compulsory savings in Port Moresby at pokies joints, night clubs and on womanising, drinking binges and other extravagant lifestyle available in the PNG’s capital city. You are looking at sums like K120,000, K100,000 or K80,000 squandered in a matter of months under the bright lights of Port Moresby and going home to the village with the meri na pikinini empty-handed. This blatant stupidity happens this way. The retired or retrenched civil servant travels to Port Moresby, if he is an out of towner, to check on his final entitlements. The wait for the final pay-out can range from a few days to weeks and months. After ‘camping out’ at Waigani and knocking on the doors a number of time, the pay-out finally comes, usually as a cheque or a bank transfer. Getting the final money in the hand, the long long (stupidity) begins. Usually it starts with that seemingly innocent trip down to the closest night club or pokies parlour. The taste of rubbing shoulders with ardent socialites, the comforting and alluring touches of meri Papua (both acting and genuine) and the atmosphere created by patrons and hosts in these joints, is too good not to give it a second visit. The second visit leads to the third and the rest, as they say, is history. After many months of being on the high side of the social life in Port Moresby, reality begins to sink in – the balance on the bank receipt at the next ATM shows that one has returned to his former self, when he begged the money lender down the street to subsidise his living until the next pay day. Finally the truth hits home and the extravagant-spending retiree finds the next opportunity to get a plane ticket out of Port Moresby to the village or alternately retire into hiding as a dependent of a wantok at a settlement. For those who have squandered their money and returned home to the village, it has meant returning to a life of gardening and living the basic subsistence lifestyle like everyone else there. One other version of this reckless use of retirement benefits involves those who resign from work intentionally to get the pay-out often under the guise of wanting to invest or start up a business. This mainly involves teachers. Some teachers who have been teaching between say 10 and 25 years have resigned and collected their pay-outs and squander them in equally extravagant ways. After the money runs out, they return to teaching, beginning at the lowest level as beginners as their many years of service had been wiped out by the receipt of the pay-out and they had been regarded as new teachers. For those teachers with many years of experience to resume teaching as new recruits, is an unfortunate abuse of saving schemes available to teachers. The same is the story for ex-public servants who squander their retirement and retrenchment pay-outs. Are all these men stupid as reflected by their actions? Or are they a reflection of a lack of education and awareness of importance of saving for the future and particularly for retirement? These men are mostly part of what I call the first wave of public servants and private sector employees who took up jobs made available to them in the years before, during and immediately after independence. They were, if you like, the ‘pioneering’ members of a fledgling economy of PNG. While the matter raised above involves only the cases that I am aware of, it is an unfortunate testament on a country where its citizens are regarded generally as people who do not save money for the future. Political leaders and other commentators have said many times that Papua New Guineans are people who hardly save up for the future. This column thinks that the key to developing and instilling a savings culture in the workforce and the general public is education. With education and awareness, perhaps the folks described above would not have abused their lifetime’s savings. In recent years, the retirement savings sector has been aggressively promoting the need for savings for the future when one retires. Competition among the different retirement funds to attract new membership and promotion of the various new products and services on offer has been somewhat aggressive as well. This is healthy for a country whose people do not have the culture or habit of saving for the future.
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