Rubbish, rubbish everywhere

By ELIAS LARI
MOUNT Hagen is the third largest city of Papua New Guinea.
It is a nice cool place with nice cool people. They say that when you are meeting someone for the first time, or when you visit a place for the first time, first impressions count.
Those impressions will already give the visitor a foresight into what the person they are meeting or the place they are visiting will be like.
Mt Hagen, the third largest city in PNG, right now doesn’t look clean and beautiful as it should.
Piles of rubbish are everywhere in the town. On top of the huge piles of rubbish is the problem of lawlessness.
Criminal activities are rife, street vending is lending to problems in the city and potholes lend to the ugliness of the place. The place is becoming a burgeoning meeting place for drunkards and drug addicts.
Marijuana and homebrew are sold in public places like bus stops and even on the streets.
Young men are illegally collecting takings from women and girls who sell their wares in front of shops and bus stops.
Travelling in to the town from other highlands provinces or from the coast on a PMV, the first thing people notice with aghast is the filth, mud and piles of rubbish dotting the city.
It seems that everywhere you turn, you see rubbish.
People and the general public are confused as to who is responsible for the cleanup of Mt Hagen city while some people are pointing their fingers at their MPs..
Community leaders from the surrounding tribes such as Moge, Jika, Yamka, Kopi, Elti, Pinambe, Mumka, Kintika, Kungnuka, Palga, Kemi, Kukluka, Kaukluka, as landowners, are not particularly pleased about the situation.
Bus stops at the main market and Hela and Southern Highlands stops have become hotspots for bag snatching.
The travelling public, including women and girls, do not feel safe about travelling to the city or even within the city itself.
Street vendors sell cooked food and store goods in front of shops.
Shop owners are issued threatening words when they try to get rid of these pests from outside their premises. Flower beds and public areas are becoming rubbish dumps for the restaurant and shops owners with rubbish removal around the city now unavailable. Huge piles of rubbish have accumulated in several locations since last year and it seems they might remain there for a while into the unforeseen future.
City manager Pious Pim has said that the functions and responsibilities of the City Council have come to a standstill because funding has
dried up.
He claims that the new city authority set up by an act of parliament to take care of Mt Hagen has frozen all accounts and blocked access to tax revenue collected in the city.
“All our financial access has been blocked and we are handicapped because of the new the Act,” Pim said.
The former City Council has not been able to carry out its municipal duties since January last year.
However, Mt Hagen city authority chief executive officer Leo Noki has brushed aside Pim’s claim, saying that he (Pim) still has access to the account and equipments to clean the city. Noki said Pim has taken out an ex parte order from the national court in Mt Hagen to stop his (Noki’s) office from having anything to do with council equipment and staff and added that when the authority briefly took over municipal responsibilities for four months, the city was well maintained.
Mt Hagen businessman Pet Watt has condemned the current look of the city which he described as a threat to the health of the people.
He said no-one seems to care about what is happening in the city and things are going from bad to worse.
He has urged the national government to declare Mt Hagen a national disaster zone.
Many presume that it is that it is the responsibility of the Hagen MP, William Duma but Duma has come out saying the responsibility for keeping Mt Hagen town clean falls on the shoulders of the new city authority. The MP explained that his budget does not include the city which is appropriated grants by the national government.
Duma added that it would require a combined effort from all parliamentarians from Western Highlands, Governor Paias Wingti, Koi Trappe, Wesley Nukundi, Benjamin Poponawa to contribute funding and resource to clean the
mess as a provincial capital.
Business houses, residents, visitors and the general public do not feel safe. As the piles of rubbish get higher and higher or wider and wider, the stench is also getting worse.
It might be safe to say that people from the Western Highlands are longer proud of their capital.