What’s CIMC doing?

THE term ‘Consultative Implementation and Monitoring Council’ CIMC sounds majestic for it portrays in the mind of any reader that this is an institution responsible for in-depth investigation into end outcomes of government-funded programmes and projects such as roads, bridges, schools and aid post.
Far from the truth, for the announcement is overshadowed by characters and institutions riding on foreign grants to promote family and sexual violence under the term family and sexual violence action committee.
While the subject of family and sexual violence is an important yard stick to measure progress being made (if there is any) in PNG on human rights, women’s rights, gender-based and sexual violence, the funding authority with its selected advocates are making a mockery of these issues by riding on the back of respected individuals who uphold the rule of law and human dignity when attending to these social issues in the communities we live and serve.
Certain funding agencies since 2013 have played a ‘divide, rule and destroy’ tactics to establish local programmes some of us have tirelessly cemented within communities with no support funding from any direction for generations.
When funding agencies stepped in with promises of big money, offices, cars, computers, allowances and opportunities, we were coerced into believing there was an answer to many of our daily struggles.
They and their advocates come up with sophisticated strategies, with classroom-type teaching, with a single person lecturing all day and all week.
We are adults and our day-to-day practice among people we live and work with are not prepared on scripts that should be read and acted for the screen.
CIMC and its partners and funding agencies have failed us not once but twice in 2019 and 2020 in Goroka by not paying an allowance to participants from Jiwaka, Chimbu and Eastern Highlands.

Gerard Saleu
Natural Advocate