Group raises concerns over state of road

A GROUP of landowners from Lelet, Central New Ireland LLG, fronted up at government house in Kavieng to meet Governor Sir Julius Chan, members of the provincial executive council and provincial administration.
The group was there to raise concern on the deteriorating state of their road which had become impassable.
Women described how they struggled to bring their garden produce to the main market, to get their sick children to the hospital and at times were stranded because of the cargo they were carrying.
They said pregnant mothers, children and the elderly had to walk to the coast to get medical services at Kimadan.
The landowners also regretted their treatment of Sir Julius during the 2017 elections.
They said that after giving all their votes to the opposition party, and after waiting for a year and seeing no work done on their road they realised they had chosen the wrong leader.
“Sir Julius, you walked the track from Kalili to Lelet to Lasigi and you built that road with the defence force many years ago, it helped our people but now it has deteriorated. It is very difficult to travel, please help us to fix that road,” ward member Martin Dely said.
Sir Julius accepted the group’s plea saying the provincial government would look into it.
“If we spend too much time talking about the past, we forget the future,” he said.
He asked finance chief executive Richard Andia to give an account of how much the New Ireland government had in its operating account before he could give a response to the landowners.
“Right now we do not have much but we can start off with K500,000. It’s not much but I will divert some money from one of our other priority projects.”
Sir Julius instructed provincial works manager Solomon Pela to work around the budget and start road works as soon as possible.