Reform is a sore disappointment

NATION

By FRANK SENGE KOLMA
[email protected]

BEN Micah, the principal architect of the Provincial and Local Level Government reforms in 1995 is bitterly disappointed today at how it has turned out.
It was under Micah’s tutelage as Chairman of the Constitution and Law Reform Commission, that the Organic Law on Provincial Government (OLPG) was repealed. The system of government that law authorized into existence was abolished after serving the nation, and in particular the 20 provinces at the time, for 19 years following the OLPG’s abrupt introduction in the first amendment to the National Constitution in 1976.
It was replaced by the new Organic Law on Provincial and Local Level Governments. There began in 1997, after a two year hiatus, a new system of Provincial and Local Level governments in Papua New Guinea.
Twenty-five years on, the principal architect of the reforms chooses a rather strange term to describe the institution he breathed life into. He says it is an ‘aberration’, a departure from what was expected.
Micah tells me that, contrary to his expectations, the reform has created more political infighting than ever before with the effect it has put goods and services delivery at a greater distance from the people than previously existed.
It is a disappointment that is deep rooted and widespread already.
Yet another proposal is before Parliament to reform this reformed system of government, this one co-sponsored by the Constitution and Law Reform Commission and the Department of Provincial and Local Government Affairs and proposing a gradative decentralization process.
There really is no conclusive finding or evidence of where the fault lies four and a half decades on and after many changes. It is difficult to pin down blame on whether it is in the law that gives birth to the type of government or in the administrative arrangements or in the funding and fiscal aspects of the government, or in the people’s responsiveness and appreciation of that tier of government.
Comparing and contrasting the one law with the other and the systems of government each law invoked and whether or not the type of government was appreciated by both those chosen to lead the process and the people the process was to govern shall be subjects of our continuing conversations.
Change in 1995
Let us here now focus of the man who engineered the changes in 1995.
Parliament, by a master stroke, had found in Mr Micah, a man who had witnessed the provincial government under the original OLPG blossom to full flower and then wither and die before his very eyes in Morobe Province.
He more than most had witnessed it work and watched it fail. If there was any man who would know where and what the faults were, it was Mr Micah.
Ben Micah was, by 1995, representing the New Ireland seat of Kavieng as Open MP, serving his first term in Parliament.
He was born on December 22, 1959 to pioneering Seventh Day Adventist missionary parents Moni Kopul of Tasitel village Musau Island and Tamiropi of Vuliale village, Emirau island.
Tamiropi was later christened Micah from whom the son got his badge.
He grew up in the 1960s and had his primary and secondary education through the 1970s – exiting years when the territories of Papua and New Guinea were being prepared for self governing status and independence.
In high school at Kembubu, East New Britain, he encountered close hand the nationalist movement of the Mataungan Association up and down the Gazelle Peninsula.
“They wanted to chase out the white man. They wanted to chase out the Chinese. They wanted to take over government and business.
“When we went down shopping there were marches and speeches. It was an exciting time.”
The leaders were people like John Kaputin, Oscar Tammur, Damien Kereku and others.”
Micah spent a short while at Fulton college in Fiji before returning to teach at Mt Diamond High School in Central.
He remembers best when at Independence his father and a Catholic priest together blessed the PNG flag at Ganai village at Warangoi, before lowering the Australian flag for the last time and raising the bird of paradise to its place.
In 1982 he got accepted to attend the University of Technology at Lae to study business and accounting and got engaged in student leadership and politics. They were to chart his future course and in a little way he impacted the future course of the country in the manner he helped tweak the provincial and local level government system.
His first job after university was with Coopers and Lybrand and a short while later he was invited by Premier for Morobe, Mr Utula Samana to join his team as an accountant with a Morobe government business arm.
He contested the by-election for Kavieng after the incumbent Gerard Singulogo was dismissed from office following the Barnett Commission of Inquiry into Forestry. He came second and was elected in his second attempt in 1992.
After he was elected, the Wingti Government chose him to Chair a Special Parliamentary Committee charged with reviewing an earlier Parliamentary Committee report on the provincial government system.
When after reviewing that report and touring the country for further public debate and discussions, Micah committee’s recommended abolition of the entire system of provincial governments as it then existed, Parliament charged him to continue his task and come up with a blue print for its replacement.
Micah was made Chairman of the Constitution and Law Reform Commission for this purpose.
The first review of the second tier government, carried out by a bi-partisan Parliamentary Committee headed by the late Yaip Havini, MP for Finschhafen, had come to the conclusion that the system of government had failed in its entirety.
The Havini Committee recommended the complete repeal of the Organic Law on Provincial Government to be replaced by a simpler government closer to the people.
Havini was a People’s Progress Party (PPP) man. It fell to PPP’s Ben Micah to deliver the goods, as it were.
Micah fell to the task with much energy and enterprise and survived the fall of the Wingti Administration in 1994 and the rise of Sir Julius Chan’s to deliver the Provincial and Local Level Government system to PNG.
He had seen the provincial government system work in its proper sense in Morobe Province under the premiership of a man he very much admired, the late Utula Samana.
Student protest
Their paths had crossed in 1983 at the University of Technology in Lae when Micah was one of the student ring leaders of a rather obstinate and violent national student strike and Samana was Premier of Morobe.
Micah and cohort had barricaded the university and the police riot squad had occupied the University with instructions to put down the strike.
Samana took it upon himself to discharge instead the police from the university, claiming violation of student’s rights to freely assemble and peacefully protest policies they saw as detrimental to their welfare. The issue at the heart of that strike was the removal of a national lecturer by the name of Mr Jonathan Soten.
The premier did not have any real power to do what he did but using extreme force of will power and eloquent arguments that was his nature, Samana forced the police from the University and gained for himself an army of hardened student followers, among them, Micah.
Micah admired Samana
“I really admired Utula Samana,” says Micah. “He was charismatic and he was forceful. This guy was an intellectual with his feet on the ground.”
Samana made the Provincial Government system work.
Upon graduating from his business and accounting course Mr Micah joined Samana in late 1985 as an accountant in the Morobe Government business arm.
Micah tells me he left the accounting to an expatriate who seemed rather adept at that task so that he could follow his champion into the farthest reaches of Morobe where the Premier was to be found hard at work with his people.
It was as fascinating as it was educational for a young man with future political ambitions.
He did not know that the exposure he had to Mr Samana’s work would become very useful in his later role when he was charged with reforming the provincial government system.
“Utula Samana attracted people to him but he also forcefully enforced his will in the Morobe administration and influenced the psyche of the Morobe people. He made sure that all his instructions and directions were carried out by the administration.
“He had top administrators working for him like Gus Sweinfurth, Benson Nablu, Vari Fore, Tracey Doherty, Galun Kasas, Manasupe Zurenuoc, and Julien Davis.
“He formed the Morobe Independent Group and broke the back of Pangu in Morobe province. Pangu never recovered from that. They never recovered from that.”
What really left a lasting impression upon Micah from his time in Morobe was how Samana used powers under the Organic Law on Provincial Governments to very great effect.
“Samana did the most extraordinary thing. He enacted the Lae City Authority Act in the Tutumang which effectively removed the Lae City Council from the control of the national government and the business community and vested it under the control of the Morobe Provincial Government.
With that he appointed the board and his own city managers. He took control of the city administration and he took control of taxation in the industrial city.
He next designed and charged a goods and services tax, many years before the National Government did the same.
Firm control over finances
Samana then passed the Community Governments Act with which he took control of the districts.
Now Premier Samana had control of the city and the tax base and he had control of the districts.
With the money from the taxation he proceeded to open up remote parts of Morobe to vehicular traffic.
“Morobe had a top administration and also the tax base from Lae City,” says Micah now.
With these monies he used to develop the Morobe hinterland. He opened up Morobe, build a road from Gagidu into the hinterland of Finschhafen, was Wasu to Kabul, and Bulolo to Menyamya.
“He set up the Anga Development Authority, the Fisica Development Authority, the Huon Development Authority. The idea of authorities first came about in Morobe (before it was designed for national application in 2014) and he used those authorities to develop the hinterland of Morobe.”
Samana was a follower of Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s agrarian policies and took it upon himself to set up trial farms in Wau and throughout Morobe.
A fatal flaw
And then Samana committed a fatal flaw. Believing he would take his success into Parliament he took his MIG party in for National Elections in 1997. He won but his party lost and he was forced to join the National Party.
From there it was rapidly downhill for the former shining star of Provincial Government. There was intensive infighting by provincial and national Morobean leaders with the effect that all that had been gain by Premier Samana was laid to waste.
Micah had watched all of this.
When he was charged with designing the next phase of the provincial government system in PNG, he carefully inserted all that had worked for Morobe under Samana into the new system while being extremely careful to remove all that had proved detrimental to Samana’s efforts and achievements.
And so the muscle of an elected provincial legislature was removed and replaced by representatives from the national legislature (MPs) and from the Local Level Government assemblies (Presidents & Mayors) to play down the jealousies and fierce infighting between provincial and national politicians that so-characterized the old provincial government system.
Local governments were given greater roles and responsibilities as had been done in Morobe.
Provincial and district budget priority committees were introduced into the new system with demands upon them to produce five year corporate plans.
A different structure
Says Mr Micah: “The structure of the new system we designed was completely different. We integrated the different levels – national government, provincial assemblies and local level governments.
“We wanted to remove the infighting by politicians at local, provincial and national levels. The old system gave law-making powers to the provincial assembly of elected representatives. We did not.”
The old system produced three different elections of varying lengths – five year terms for national parliament, four years for provincial level and three years for LLGs. The new system had only one election – for national and local level governments only.
That was the intention. The outcome in practice has been different and disappointing.
Micah says: “The competition has become worse, sad to say. The infighting between governors, MPs and Presidents is worse, contrary to our intention.”
And that is all we have space for. This is our 15th conversation. As we go to press a seminar by the National Research Institute is in progress discussing the very subject of decentralisation and what the future bodes.
The next few issues will feature discussions at this august forum.