O’Neill-Namah showing the way

THE O’Neill-Namah government is quickly gaining overwhelming antion-wide popularity and support for introducing many changes to correct wrongs and inefficiencies since it come to power in August last year. The government’s announcement of two major public policy statements in the form of free  education and free medical health service has further boosted its popularity nation-wide.
Indeed the government’s free education and free medical care policies are good but will be costly, accounting for an estimated K2 billion annually.
The two sectors alone would attract a significant portion of the national  budget.
This is fine because our people deserve it.
PNG is a very rich country and our people deserve quality education and health care services.
Our people also deserve a quality, reliable and  robust national road network system as well and the Government needs to also inject massive capital outlay into this sector too.
PNG is endowed with a very rich natural resources base and the country demands prudent management of these resources to translate our raw   natural  resources into tangible wealth creation for all citizens.
Part of our problem why majority of our people are not benefiting from   the nation’s wealth is because the existing laws do not favour the host country.
This is further compounded by the fact that state usually lacks  a coordinated strategy and skilled negotiators to negotiate smart in  project agreements with the resource developers, resulting in deals which often do  not favour the host country.
PNG’s dilemma is even worst because revenues derived from those badly negotiated projects are poorly managed as hundreds of millions leave the national coffers through corruption each year. 
Staggeringly, consecutive governments have failed to fight corruption head-on.
The O’Neill-Namah government needs to also address the inherent core  issues which deny PNG deriving maximum economic gains from our natural  resources, and I have raised some of them above.
In respect to the free education and free health care policies, I also think that the government needs to expound these policies in order to address the issue of quality.
Free education and free health care policies will fail to offer our people quality services in these sectors if capacity and infrastructure issues are not built into the two policies and adequately funded.
Our government needs to think big and it has already demonstrated that.
PNG’s economic outlook is very promising and this is fuelled largely by the resource boom in the country and the high world commodity prices  which show no sign of abating in the next two decades.
One thing that the government must urgently address is the  acute capacity and resource issues currently affecting the Department of  Petroleum and Energy, which is the principal regulator of PNG’s  billion dollar hydrocarbon industry.
I support the government’s policy on free education and free health care services but if the relevant state institutions which regulate key economic sectors are poor resourced and managed, the long-term viability and sustainability of implementing these major policies would be futile.

K. Koya
Port Moresby