Vetting of clans a real puzzle

IT is surprising that the clan-vetting exercise is still continuing to this day despite millions of kina allocated years ago.
Even the recent newspaper advertisement of the clan-vetting exercises completed so far to date appears to be riddled, unbelievably, with so many newly created clans, sub-clans, and even family names listed as clan-owning groups.
One of the potential issues that the government needs to be aware of is that the result of clan vetting especially up in the Highlands – is likely to create more chaos among the landowner beneficiaries who are directly within the pipeline corridor, and those who the clan-vetting exercise has identified as not directly within the pipeline corridor but, unfortunately, who have to be included as beneficiaries as well.
This is unfortunately the case because the current law allows for the landowner beneficiaries to be those identified within the pipeline corridor and those within 10km (5km either side) of the pipeline corridor.
The Government should seriously consider amending the so-called 10km pipeline corridor beneficiary landowners as it is quite impracticable to be regarded as such under our customary land tenure system.
It is very sad to see that this ongoing clan-vetting exercise has unfortunately become a sweet milking cow for the authorities as well as private consultants, while the beneficiary landowner’s benefits payments continues to be delayed as a result.
The Government should not be blaming the landowners for the delays in the clan-vetting exercise, but should squarely accept the blame itself (ie, the past Government of course) for not diligently ensuring that the requirements for full-scale social mapping and landowner identification study by the project developer were completed properly prior to the project construction.
Let’s hope the Government does not go through the same mistakes again when dealing with the Gulf LNG project or other upcoming similar projects for that matter.

Lawrence Billy
Hospital Hill