Bureaucracy impeding progress, says fund official

BUREAUCRACY is the biggest challenge developers and investors face when trying to acquire land or property in urban cities and towns, says a superfund official.
Nambawan Super Limited (NSL) chief investment officer David Kitchnoge said this when responding to a question raise by The National on challenges they faced in acquiring properties within city limits.
“NSL is part of the PNG Property Developers Association and one of the main challenges we’ve identify is the bureaucracy,” he said.
“When you have influence from influential people who have ties to politics it makes it impossible for genuine developers to come in because it takes up a lot of time and money to go to court and to get titles.
“For us as Funds, and I’m sure for Nasfund too, we operate our budget entirely from our members’ savings and when we have issues like that, it poses a huge challenge for us to explain to our members of such spending,” Kitchnoge explained.
Meanwhile, NSL chief executive officer Paul Sayer added that the provincial governments needed to clearly identify commercial land areas within city limits, as well as do proper planning for suburbs and townships.
Sayer was referring to a property acquired by the Fund at Four Mile, Boroko, in Port Moresby.
“We have had some of our land occupied by illegal settlers and it has taken us years to take it back through court, and some are pending courts decisions and is costing us money,” he said.
“City planning authorities should work together with developers to assist them in securing those titles so that we properly plan our cities and towns, instead we can see evidence now that our cities like Port Moresby, Lae and Mt Hagen have no proper planning.
“Titles are given to anyone as long as they know people or have wantoks,” Sayer added.
“There is a need to take pride in our infrastructure developments as well and by having access to a property or land we acquire in the city without going through such bureaucratic problems, we would have planned out the city properly that it can attract investors as well tourists,” Sayer said.
He said city and town land in major urban needed to be developed properly with planning so that it attracted investors as well as tourists.