Build highways, clear obstructions

 WHILE talks continue about borrowing extensively to rebuild the Highlands Highway, a certain group of professionals are risking life and limb everyday to deliver very important cargo to and from the most populous region of the country.

The highway drivers basically keep the seven highlands provinces operating. 

Their job is not easy, ha­ving to concentrate for hours driving 10 to 12 hours non-stop and through some of the roughest terrain in the country.

The terrain has changed over the years – for the worse. Today, potholes stretch across for most of the way. When they slow down or stop to negotiate the road, they are pounced upon by criminals who pace beside particularly bad stretches waiting for their chance to rob a truck carrying valuable cargo.

Insurance companies have long ago given up on insu­ring trucks, their cargoes and drivers on the Highlands Highway so that now most just have to chance it.

Our front page story today once again tells of another brutal attack on two highway drivers who did nothing 

other than to rescue each other and their trucks and cargoes.

One was struck on a slippery patch so the other went to pull him out but the locals of the area had other ideas. They wanted the truck to remain stuck on the road so as to close off traffic in both directions. 

The locals would then build a side track to allow traffic to pass and collect money from each vehicle as it passed through.

This has now become a lucrative business all along the highway. A truck gets bogged down creates an opportunity. 

The locals loot the truck of its contents, then hold the truck and its driver to ransom and if they create a side road to allow traffic to flow, they collect money from road users and sometimes from each passenger in any vehicle.

They have diverted creeks and streams onto the road to create landslides or damage the road to force vehicles to slow down sufficiently so that the people can rob road users. 

This has gone on for far too long.

Firstly, the entire highway needs to be fixed as a matter of urgency. 

This highway services almost half of the seven million people of PNG living in the seven highlands provin­ces. 

It services the business and people living in Kainantu, Goroka, Kundiawa, Minj and Banz, Mt Hagen, Wape­namanda, Wabag, Porgera, Ialibu, Mendi and Tari.

It also services the Porgera gold mine, the Kutubu, Gobe and Moran oil fields and the Hides gas fields which will soon become PNG’s first gas project.

By anybody’s calculation, one would have thought that the highway would have been the single, most important project since the PNG LNG project agreement was signed in May 2008.

While the developer Ex­xonMobil was preparing construction of the LNG plant and laying the pipelines, the government ought to have been reconstructing the entire Highlands Highway and indeed connecting Hela and Southern Highlands to the Gulf province and constructing a port in the Gulf.

But no, the government has just been talking year-in year-out while its vital road link is actually dying. With each passing year the cost has gone up.

Worse, the trucking companies and their employees as well as other regular users of the highway have really suffered much. Some have lost their limbs and lives.

This is really tragic, made more tragic by the fact that this suffering is entirely avoidable. It is also tragic because the cost for rebuilding the highway is now affordable, even if on the very expensive side.

The other issue, for which blame must also be laid at the feet of government, is its inability to formulate very strong rules relating to those who choose to damage the highway or loot and rob people on it.

There is a law which prohibits any habitation or use of land 20m on each side of a national highway. This corridor is to be left free from encumbrance for future expansion of the road and for services lines such as power, telecommunications or water supply lines.

This rules is violated very clearly and yet government and responsible authorities have allowed the people to encroach on road reserves.

This too must be dealt with swiftly and firmly to send a message throughout the country that all highways must be free for the use of all.