Vision 2050 set to gather dust too

Whatever happened to the vision that was put together by the Baloiloi committee made up of academic consultants paid by the State to purposefully plan and develop PNG’s strategic vision plan called “Vision 2020”? 
There are still 10 years remaining of that vision, enough time to determine its course and evaluate to see if some of the strategies set out in that plan are still achievable or amended to suit the country’s development. 
The 40-year Vision 2050 plan is put together by another set of PNG think-tank academic consultants.
This plan is set to collect dust once the MPs realise this is the biggest blunder they have made by supporting it.
It only goes to show that PNG has so many illiterate leaders who do not read and question the pros and cons of Vision 2050, and how and why it was put together by academic consultants without their participation.
Let me ask the MPs one question that should have been raised before tabling Vision 2050 in Parliament – where and how is the Government planning to fund the implementation of Vision 2050 over the next 40 years? 
The answer is simple, from all the Open Members’ DSIP funds.
The current development budget and its priorities through the planning process should be focusing more on impact and social priority areas such as education and health but the planning process has broke down and the Public Investment Programme (PIP) appears to be completely frozen.
With the 40-year Vision 2050 passed by Parliament, the Government is now indirectly telling the 89 Open MPs and their JDP&PBC “you no longer need to do any more planning or spending through all your JDP&PBC, here is the Government’s plan and this is what you should follow in expending your K10 million DSIP funding for all your districts over the next 40 years”.
Who in their right mind would want to plan 40 years into the future but forgets to plan or deal with the immediate problems the country is currently facing?
What is happening to our God-fearing nation that has put God aside and looks to its cultural heritage as its source of strength and boasts in its constitution that was never really theirs in the first place but adopted to suit our country?
We have continued to adopt one system after another but fail to adapt them to suit our needs.
A typical example is our education system which is an adopted Western system that is currently defunct.
What are we doing about the almost 100,000 plus unskilled graduates and school leavers that are put out every year by our education system?
This has been going for the past three decades.
School leavers, when pushed out by the system, contribute to social disorder.
Drug and homebrew consumption are out of control and they usually lead to crime-related mayhem.
Chaos and lawlessness, increased unemployment and total anarchy are evident but yet the Government is so blind to notice this pandemonium at its doorstep.
Serious planning and managing of our human resources, especially all our school-leavers, will minimise social problems in PNG and we will be able to develop our manpower resources to manage all our natural resources and develop our country into a competitive economy in the South Pacific.
Our health system is an adopted Western system as well and has also become a total disgrace because it is completely outdated.
What are we doing about getting medicine and medical personnel into the rural areas where the bulk of our population resides?
With each passing week, more and more Papua New Guineans die from curable diseases such as malaria, TB, diarrhoea, fever, etc, in our rural areas.
Furthermore, our maternal mortality rate is very high.
Therefore, the 40-year Vision 2050 plan should really look at the country’s immediate planning needs including medium term planning in order to anticipate what the Vision 2050 plan will give us.
We seem to use very big words in our visions but fail to see the big picture.

 
Bilak Bokis planner
Los Angeles, California,
USA