How state and people benefit

Weekender
DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY

By MICHAEL UGLO
THIS is the seventh in my series of articles on digital economy.
We will look at how the Government will benefit from digital technology to make our nation one of the richest in the world.
Manpower in technology
PNG has been independent more than 40 years and we are not a child or young anymore. We should seriously be working harder and smarter to make ends meet. We have a good education system adopted from our colonial masters that has shaped us.
The fundamental idea of a biological science of life is the question of the characteristics to develop to keep life going. The analogy is true of us as citizens and our government to abide by this universal fact that we have to adhere to working smarter for our survival as a nation.
Our education system had pioneered in getting our people to basically become literates and numerates. Thus if we combine the literates and numerates into working through in extremes as adapting to strategies to yield outcomes needed by other members of the human societies then this is already business which will produce incomes.
What matters most here is product quality and sustainability which requires good know how to have it sellable. This basically summarises the meaning of education.
The above is the epilogue in which to integrate technology into the above scenario. Having a good return from your business and living a progressive life will add the impetus for others to emulate you. That is uniquely applicable to PNG where more than 80 per cent of our land is customarily owned.
People hence will feel compelled to use their land to practically do something apart from producing organic crops because the return is very good. When we emphasise that the return is very good that basically means that you have a market that is lucrative and that clients are actually doing business with you.
What it all boils down to is that we are not talking about the Kundiawa town market, Lae main market or Gordons market in NCD. The market we are referring to is the market outside of PNG and of course a little portion of it in our domestic markets as mentioned above. The idea is to make money and when doing so there should be active entrepreneur activities and consumption in PNG.
A national overseer in technology to mobilise all economic activities through a distributed system in the technology of an application through a data communication equipment (DCE) and data terminal equipment (DTE) will categorically add support and regulation to each citizen’s quest to acquire wealth at his or her own pace.
The product from a highly organised systems like the technology briefly mentioned here is very reliable to tap into by government action or undertaking simply because an independent medium which is the technology or digital technology will respond to a nation and its people’s request on any issue involving business and other civil matters like.
Civil matters can include some of the worst crimes and activities that are going on in the country and are not addressed or very little is reported about them.
The manpower we have are the PNG numerates and the literates because you do not need education to use a touch screen phone. Almost the entire population are our manpower in digital technology. This is very interesting and a very huge area of potential to tap into for economic activity to thrive in PNG.
All citizens will be contributing and most importantly be banked. The issue of banking is a very important area and for your general take, there are almost 1 billion unbanked people around the world. PNG is no exception and for PNG to embrace a digitalised economy, our unbanked population will be banked because we will be actively doing business and engaged in entrepreneurship.
Production and the pervasive system
Now to do business you have to have a product to sell. Let us say that PNG in the world market has made a name to be the producer and supplier of world class organic farm produce. It has now got the connectivity issue done and is in business. The idea to engage in business is just as simple as that. There is a business idea and PNG has just closed in capitalising on the opportunity.
The pervasive system minimised the errors in a communication channel frequency and bandwidth. Therefore the decoded information exchanged through DTE and a DCE is a formalised system transmitted for a PNG entrepreneur in wherever location she/he can be. So the PNG entrepreneur is in his or her location doing business outside of PNG which it has never got used to prior to this.
Here it can be seen that all our population will be absorbed into the world of business and just imagine the cash flowing in and out of the country. For this to happen we need the political support to facilitate the digital economy drive and a separate department of digital economy so it can administer this dream and ambition.
Trade and assimilation in the technology world
Take for instance a subsistence or wage earning family having a lot of children. Sometimes it will be extremely difficult to provide every child his or her needs like university education.
China has the world’s largest population, however, the phenomenon that captures the world’s attention is the rate at which it is converting her peasants into wage earning factory workers not in hundreds or thousands but in millions. It has opened up the connectivity in digital technology and now can trade with both the banked and unbanked around the world.
We have an advantage in organic farming. Our tropical climate with our rural agriculture-based population is just one facet of an opportunity for progress. With a reception and display of information on a PNG citizen’s terminal device such as a mobile phone it is the information in the hand of the citizen to choose to whether to move a step further in terms of acquiring wealth or choose not to.
It should be noted here that PNG is small compared to the world. It just has to connect to the rest of the world in the world of digital technology to acquire wealth and enough wealth therefore to become rich.
One is given a frequency of an occurrence of a probability for an event. We want to measure its deviation and therefore its variation for its degrees of freedom and hence its spread. That spread occurs in a finite space reduced to numbers.
Such similar distribution of frequencies of occurrences can form semi-groups for a programme in a database. Integrating such structures for fields from rings of data compilation into a computer executable programme makes it universally available to clients around the world for lucrative business in the world of digital technology which PNG can enormously benefit from.
This is the marvel of being a digitalised economy.
Next week we will cover the hypothetical topic of ‘the working team and timeline to effect digitisation and modernisation of PNG economy.’

  • Michael Uglo teaches Avionics Aircraft Engineering.

Landowners waiting ‘forever’ to be paid their dues

COMMENTARY

By PAUL MINGA
IT IS becoming a norm for landowners following up on their land compensation claims to congregate every Tuesday and Thursday at the Lands Department headquarters in Waigani.
Their continued presence is becoming an eyesore and might also draw sympathy from others passing by.
Those so-called claimants who are frequenting the office on client days are all hoping for a their long overdue payments for their pieces of land on which government facilities such as school, aid posts, health centres, roads, airports, wharves, mines, towns and other public assets are established or operating.
Among the landowners some are believed to be genuine while some only act in disguise to falsely benefit from claims that have real claimants being paid out long time. Some may simply awaiting payment against falsified claims that had be professionally done and put forward in collaboration with those in the system, a practice that is taking root in government institution and department nowadays.
It is a practice which seemed impossible to eradicate.
The sad tale about the landowners who are hoping for a payout of their claims, whether it is first, second, third or the final quarter of the initial amount.
Several claim payout dates have been announced verbally by lands officers from time to time and the number of times notices being put up on the notice board those dates have never been honoured and every time payment postponed to a later date.
However, the continuous deferment of payout date has seen weeks wind down to months and gradually to a close of the year as the new year emerges. This is nothing new as it becomes a culture in PNG and sadly is here to stay for generations.
For other countries around the world do they deny the citizens right in postponing what rightfully belongs to them? It’s a question that we need to ask. Maybe our country is denying its citizens their due claims just because of the obvious reason of no money.
To prevent all hell, frustration and anger that are most likely to come from the so-called landowners, it would be better and an honorable thing for the Lands Department to come out clearly in revealing the truth to the landowners and also set a single definite date so all claims can be sorted out.
I wonder if it is as hard as an algebra problem to set a definite payout date for the Lands Department to tell the truth to the landowners who have been hoping for ages and in some losing their lives over the prolonged wait without receiving their money.
By the way, a definite date will prevent landowners from going to the extremes in putting themselves in awkward situations like traveling to Port Moresby on borrowed money and promising to pay off the loans with interest afterwards.
A definite date for payouts will stop all other problems and prevent landowners from travelling to Port Moresby so they would stay back in doing something more worthwhile at home. It is really sad and unpleasant to see landowners wasting away their valuable time here in the streets of Port Moresby by going and coming every time to the Lands headquarters in the hope of getting paid.