Madang road gets funding

 By DOROTHY MARK

FUNDING has finally been made available to repair and upgrade the Medo-Lagaha road in the Mele area in Madang.

The road was built in 1972 and no funding had been allocated for its maintenance since.

The road services more than 10,000 people in Bamahal, Fulumu, Bauk and Lagaha villages but is in extremely poor condition and parts of it dangerous. It has big cracks and holes.

Madang MP and Minster for Petroleum and Energy Nixon Duban presented K500,000 to Equi Plant Road Construction Company to fix the road. The groundbreaking ceremony of the road construction on Thursday came five days after the groundbreaking ceremony for the Baiteta-Budib road.

It was known that Duban was in Madang attending to an election petition case filed against him by Madang businessman Peter Yama.

Duban’s officer Keith Gedabing said court proceedings took up much of the MP’s time. “I want all feeder roads to be connected because other developments follow when we have good roads,” Duban told Ohu villagers at the groundbreaking ceremony.

He encouraged home-brew and marijuana consumers in the area to stop the habits.

“Plant cocoa and use the road to transport them to town and earn your own income instead of calling out, member wasa, wasa,” Duban said.

He announced that his government had committed K500,000 to Digicel PNG to issue Ipads to selected primary schools in the district.

“It’s a new programme that we are working on with Digicel, this is apart from the district’s one laptop per child policy,” Duban said.

 He committed funds to build a teacher’s house and one double classroom for Ohu Primary School and said the contactor engaged would be re-engaged to build five more teachers’ houses if he produced a good acquittal report that matched the buildings.