Aitsi urges leaders to show qualities against corruption

THE government needs to demonstrate leadership in the fight against corruption and not just talk about it, chairman for Transparency International PNG Peter Aitsi said.
Aitsi said PNG’s current placing of 154 out of 178 countries on the 2010 corruption perceptions index (CPI) launched last Wednesday by Transparency International needed to be a serious warning to the government to get up and consider the kind of commitment required to truly tackle corruption.
He said government showed a lack of commitment and political will to address corruption in public
“We are concern because we are not seeing any demonstrated and significant action against corruption and lack of improved ranking on CPI over the last five years.
“As corruption seemingly taking place within our public systems, public institutions and as level of revenue flowing through government system increases, we are going to see significant losses of public funds if the government does not take firm decisive action to address corruption within the public service,” Aitsi said.
He believed that CPI along with the human development index (HDI) were part of the measurement tools  for the Vision 2050 and was relevant to government in terms of achieving some of the benchmark it set for itself.
“As long as corruption exist within the government system, whatever benefits that we expected from the LNG will not be realised.
“There are hundreds of millions of kina being lost through weakened systems. You only need to look at the commission of inquiry report to ask questions on what has happened to the commission of inquiry report, what actions have been taken by the government to address that,” he said adding that he feared  that it would get worse and worse when more money flows into the system.
  TIPNG said to improve PNG’s score, the government must strengthen its institution oversight and legal frameworks that actually enforced best practices coupled with smarter and more effective regulation.
This would lead to increase of trust in public institutions, sustained economic growth and more effective development assistance.