The rise and rise of Enga

Stable leadership works, as demonstrated by Governor Sir Peter Ipatas

By FRANK SENGE KOLMA
[email protected]m

THE debate has raged long and hard over the failure of the provincial government system in its principle goals to bring government closer to the people and for better delivery of goods and services.
Is it the law? Is it the administrative system? Is it the leadership? Or is it all or a combination of these issues that has been responsible for a systematic failure of this second and third tier governments to bring about development?
These questions have forced much discussion over the years with little in definitive answers.
In 1995 the law and the entire system of provincial government was abolished after 20 years of seeing it in operation. We have given 25 further years to the reformed provincial and local level government system. That too has not produced the results anticipated.
A proposal is now before Parliament from the Constitution and Law Reform Commission and the Department of Provincial and Local Government Affairs proposing yet another change of the whole system.
What is required, I think, is for a step back and examine this from all angles.
What exactly is eluding us after nearly 50 years of experimenting with this system of government.
As we have seen in earlier discussions in this space, the inclusion of this second tier of government was a reluctant first amendment to the Constitution one year after Independence, a blackmail as it were, to appease the secessionist tendencies of North Solomons Province, now the Autonomous Region of Bougainville.
This troublesome child remains yet on the fringes, this time having voted by an overwhelming 97 per cent in 2019 at a referendum for outright Independence.
Stable government
We shall come, by and by, to this child and his antics. For now, lets us examine, an aspect of politics that is taken a little too lightly by the people: The matter of stable government and stable leadership and how it fares in this subject under discussion.
For this we traverse up the Highlands Highway to the cul-de-sac province of Enga. It is a cul-de-sac because although it is smack in middle of the highlands, you can only travel into and out of Enga by the one highlands highway. An earlier route into the Southern Highlands via Kandep is only just being expanded for regular vehicular traffic.
Enga became a province in 1974 when 11,704 square kilometers of the much bigger Western Highlands was cut up and divided into the districts of Kandep, Kompiam-Ambum, Lagaip-Porgera and Wabag. The majority of its 432,000 people speak one language, Ipili, which marks it out as a special case in a country of very many languages.
It was a poor agricultural-based province until the discovery and commencement of gold mining at Porgera which has helped a fair bit in the fortunes of the province along the way.
Enter Sir Peter
Gold and the stalwart leadership of Sir Peter Ipatas, the veteran Governor of Enga.
A little elucidation is required here. The son of a highway truck driver, Peter Ipatas learned to drive before he learnt to read and write. He tells the harrowing story of how he could not find the brakes in time and drove off a cliff and lived to tell the story.
Friends today explain that this early training is perhaps the reason why he enjoys most being in the driver’s seat in politics. There is much truth there, of course.
Ipatas is a career politician. After he left university early to work in the office of then Opposition Leader, Sir Tei Abel, he has only ever been in politics.
He became a ward councilor soon after Independence and held the post for 17 years before he got into national politics.
When the Organic Law on Provincial Governments was repealed in 1995 and replaced with the Organic Law on Provincial and Local Level Governments, Ipatas was a long four-term president of the Wabag Council and chairman of combined Enga councils.
During the two-year interim period between 1995 and 1997, Ipatas took advantage of the suspension and incarceration of incumbent premier, Danley Tindiwi, and installed himself as acting governor.
With his popularity and controlling all the council votes of Enga, it was an easy step to be elected as Regional Member following the 1997 general elections and by operations of the new Organic Law was installed as inaugural governor of Enga.
He has been undefeated in five general elections since and that is the legacy we are meant to discuss after the foregoing rather convoluted but necessary preamble.
Across 25 years there has been stable leadership in Enga. Systems and process of government, setting priorities based on resources availability, insistence upon transparency and good governance has introduced changes that marks out Enga as a special and rare case in PNG.
A landmark single policy of free education has lasted all these years.
Sir Peter told me once: “Our real resource in our people. Developed by good education they are an asset.’’
“Undeveloped, they are a liability,’’ I quipped to him. That too is true, if I might say so myself.
In 1997 when Sir Peter took the reins of government he decided on a free education policy for Enga and committed all available resources towards it. It was not a mistake.
Excepting Porgera gold mine, the province had very little by way of resources to progress meaningfully.
What little it had in land holdings, timber on the lower regions of the province and isolated agricultural land in the valleys were locked in terrain which needed unlocking first.
The only hope was in the people and the one Ipili language was a powerful uniting factor.
The Engan’s natural instinct for violence and aggression could become its best weapons for development if they could be harnessed properly through education for positive province and national building pursuits.
Said Sir Peter: “We decided we had to depend on our own resources and our own abilities. We had to develop our human resources first, ahead of what physical resources we had. We had to unlock our people’s full potential and unleash it in a positive direction with all the aggression and fierceness of our inheritance.
Choosing education
“We chose education as our number one development priority. We settled for a policy of free education and budgeted K10 million annually out of the provincial budget towards it. Throughout the years we struggled through many periods of budgetary shortfalls but we never reviewed or deferred this policy’s implementation for even one year.’’
Ipatas set up a Enga Children’s Fund, now renamed the Ipatas Foundation. He committed all available resources to the fund and it grew. Today it owns prime properties and other assets valued in the hundreds of millions of kina.
But the biggest benefit, true to Sir Peter’s vision, is the people. Today Engans are to be found in every field of work in all parts of the country.
They occupy most educational institutions in both PNG and abroad.
They have grown from a querulous people prone to the tribal instinct to react violently to every occasion to a business minded people who are slowing turning their aggression to protecting their business and property – well, not quite as fast as we would hope but it is happening at a faster pace there than anywhere else.
Many more Engan men and women are walking into gainful employment and are repatriating to their relatives at home hundreds of thousands of kina which is being used to improve the lives of people in communities around the province.
Many educated Engans are returning to their homes and building better and permanent homes and using their knowledge and resources to provide services to their people.
As an example, Mapai Transport owner Jacob Luke was last seen building a road over mountainous terrain to connect his Monokam village near Ambum valley. Although Luke has not passed through Sir Peter’s free education system, his is the kind of example that has ignited interest and emulation.
There are other Engans using their resources to do their bit. Quite suddenly, the Government’s work is divided and shared by thousands of individual Engans in every field. This is what Nelson Mandela meant when he declared that “Education is the most powerful weapon that can change the world.”
Education has transformed Enga – for the better.

That is not to say all is said and done and that it is smooth sailing from here forth.
After 25 years it is merely a stepping stone but that stone is a firm foundation. It is a start that has gained the support of development partners eager to see such policies and such leadership in action.
The National Government allocated Enga K150 million in TFF and many more millions in education infrastructure and other supporting programmes. It told Enga to manage its own TFF and transferred the whole sum for the year because it had transparent and accountable systems in place to manage the fund.
With National Government help the Enga Teachers College was built. The Enga Nursing College was rebuilt and reopened.
Plans are set to build a Hela Opene polytech institute to provide technical skills for our people.
The Australian Government through AusAid stepped in to build one double classroom, one teachers’ house and an ablution block each in 12 primary schools across Enga in 2017.
The Asian Development Bank built four community aid posts in selected spots at a cost of K4.5 million each.
The European Union committed resources to building two TVET centers in Laiagam and Wapenamanda districts.
The Institute of Business Studies has opened a center outside Wabag.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has provided a five-door Land Cruiser and is supporting a child immunisation project across the province, to which the Enga Provincial Government has committed six 10-seater Land Cruisers.
Other development partners which have shown an active interest include Israel which is developing Enga’s high altitude agricultural center at Sirungki.
China which is helping to construct a new hydro power plant at Pilikambi on the border of Laiagam and Kandep utilising the natural power of the Lagaip River to produce 4.5 megawatts of power to supply the whole of Enga and feed excess power back down the Yonki highlands grid.
The Enga government and Governor Ipatas have built enduring partnerships with the Porgera Joint Venture, with Coca-Cola Amatil which is sponsoring the biggest rugby league competition in the country and Ela Motors which sponsors our Enga Miok provincial rugby league team in the Digicel Cup.
Many companies and multilateral donor agencies are coming to Enga today than when it started out in 1997 because of the changes that have been wrought and the stable leadership of Governor Ipatas.
Having set the number one priority on course, the governor can now turn to other priorities, such as health.
With the help of WHO Enga successfully immunised the majority of its children. It is building a K300 million Enga Provincial Hospital with all the modern medical specialist equipment and personnel that money can buy.
Good leadership matters
It is stark clear to me now, the answers to the questions we set out with in this conversation.
The law and administrative systems are just there to assist in the proper management of our lives.
The problem besetting PNG seems to be lack of stable and good leaderships. Morobe flourished under the visionary leadership of the late Utula Samana under the previous provincial government system. Then, as we have seen, he tried to repeat his success at the national level by entering Parliament and everything collapsed on its face.
In the case of Enga, the stable leadership of one man, Governor Ipatas across the full 25-year term of the reformed provincial and local level government system has worked wonders for the province.
The conclusion is remarkably simple. There is nothing wrong with the systems of government devised for this country. It is simply good, stable leadership that is missing.
In the two instances we have examined, it would appear there is nothing wrong with the law governing the two provincial government systems or the systems and processes they call into legal force.
They have worked just fine with the right leadership and the right priority and resources driven policies and programs.
This matter of stable and good leadership or management is crucial and a factor, not often, brought to the fore in discussions on governance and government systems.
They should henceforth.

A chat with reformist Ben Micah next.