‘Crisis’ in city affects businesses

By MALUM NALU
THE Port Moresby Chamber of Commerce and Industry says there is a crisis greatly affecting business in the city.
Chamber president Ron Seddon made an urgent appeal to parties to sort out the current uncertainty and unease in the capital, which had left  businesses and their staff “nervous, feeling frustrated and threatened  by the current  situation”.
“Those causing this nervousness need to rea­lise they are adversely affecting the lives of ordinary Papua New Guineans to a significant extent, where it hurts  in their pockets,” he said.
“The prices of goods and services to the average family will inevitably rise as the costs of doing business are forced up by the loss of days of trading and having to fill gaps left by staff who cannot or are too scared to go to work.  
“We should call this ‘self-induced inflation’ by the people and leaders of Papua New Guinea.
“Couple this with the fact that it is already expensive to do business in our country along with significant upward pressure on costs – which is never properly reflected by the inadequate measurement of CPI – and we have an extremely worrying scenario developing.
“Businesses cannot operate properly, costs rise.  Staff cannot perform, costs rise.
“Public servants take advantage of the unrest to close office, causing more delays, costs rise.”
Seddon said this week, while business got on with the job at hand as best they as could, it was noticeable that the Customs department, “already a source of costly delays for business”, and the Labour Department closed shop because of the “unrest”. 
“There was no ‘unrest’ in the CBD,” he said.
“Not even a magnitude
7.0-earthquake on the Rich­ter Scale stopped bu­si­nesses from operating.
“Crumbling infrastructure such as our roads and the severed freeway means it takes longer to get jobs done, costs rise.
“We urge NCDC to ramp up work to 24/7 to fix the freeway and not just accept that the one-lane quick fix is sufficient,” Seddon said.
He added that at peak hours, traffic heading downtown would backed up to Waigani Drive in both lanes.
“Some trucking companies are now only delivering at night as it takes too long to make a delivery during the day.
“Once again costs go up. With some container storage moved to 8-Mile, truck cartage rates have risen considerably. 
“Business is grinding to a halt and authorities are taking almost a lackadaisical approach to fixing the problem,” he said.

“The freeway issue is a crisis: get it fixed!”
Seddon said there was a crisis in confidence which was only exacerbated when “our politicised and factionalised police are sorting out internal issues and not attending to the needs of the city residents”.
“The police commissioner initially admitted he was powerless to do anything about the political issues.
“We are,  however,  pleased to see firm action at last with the arrest of five policemen on assault charges and the announcement  that the riot squads will be sent packing from our city and  back to the Highlands.”