Business of managing PNG

Editorial, Normal

ALL the excitement is happening in the business and economic world in Papua New Guinea.
Up in PNG even as the global economic recovery appears to stall as global markets react to possible contagion of Greece’s debt crisis, business is looking good.
Such crisis, as always, swings buyers away from buying currencies to the hard yellow metal, gold. And gold is Papua New Guinea’s metal with the world class Lihir and Porgera gold mines, and several other mines, in the offing. At meore than K3,000 per ounce, PNG could not go wrong with this metal.
The PNG liquefied natural gas (LNG) project, of course, would change the socio-economic landscape of this country forever – or should.
Even in the agricultural sector, the future for rubber – one of the least talked about but longstanding commodity – and vanilla looks promising.
Rubber farmers are eyeing the huge prospective Chinese market with more than passing interest and Chinese rubber dealers are already in the country, making assessments of the country’s rubber producing capacity.
One of PNG’s two pioneer vanilla processing companies, Paradise Spices Ltd, has just landed a brand new extraction plant, courtesy of the Australian government-sponsored Enterprise Challenge Fund.
The new plant gives the company capacity to double its output to 10,000kg of vanilla beans and improve the quality immensely. Along with it comes increased capacity to pay vanilla farmers more for their produce.
When we view developments all around, there is so much going on that is positive in the business and economic world.
Yet, we tend to view these developments from a dark perspective – tending always to view the glass as half empty, rather than as it being half full.
We, in the media, have been blamed for perpetuating some of these perceptions and, by and large, some of the accusations must stick.
Still, we must continue to ask the question: How can we translate all the positive developments in the business, finance and economic sector into tangible benefits in the social sector for the majority of our people?
Truth to tell while there appears to be so much money around, there is so much evidence of desperate poverty, of needless mother and child deaths from easily preventable diseases, of shocking school turnout, high crime rate and high unemployment.
Experiences from around the world do tell us that unless managed properly, immense wealth could only be experienced on paper and never translate into decent living standards for the bulk of the population.
We could also go the way other countries have done where a few members of the elite and their collection of influential friends and family members hoard all the wealth in property and secret bank accounts abroad while the population suffers.
Or, we can make a decided shift in policy based on the experiences of many resource-rich countries around the world and remodel our development paradigm.
Our own experience since 1975 should serve as the first point of reference for reviewing performance and to learn from the successes, or lack of it, thereof.
In terms of planning, there has always been a one-year money plan in the budget and, most often, a five-year medium-term development plan.
Both these sets of plans have often been most rudely interrupted in mid-implementation by regular changes of government. It is only in the last eight years that there has been no interruption in government, a quite clear set of priorities and policy directions set in medium-term development strategies which are also linked to the global millennium development goals. Provincial and district level five-year development plans have also been developed, which are linked to the MTDS.
On the planning level, there is coherence, consistency and uniformity from the ward level right up to the national level.
The plans are sufficient and here. The physical resources are here. The money is here too. The trick now is getting the right persons to manage all of these things.
All that remains now is a people thing. That, in the final analysis, will make or break the country – ourselves and our choices of managers.