To my faithful followers, and particularly the critics, I have had two digital cameras either stolen or lost from me, or wrecked, over the last two months, hence, my slowness in getting you pictures.
However, I now have a new digital camera, so you can be assured of a personal touch of photographs and stories from me, from
I can assure you of the best in 2010.
By MIKE STEKETE in The Australian
PAPUA New
So you may be surprised to hear that it has bright prospects by developing world standards, which could see it rise rapidly through the ranks. But whether those prospects can be fulfilled, particularly in terms of benefits to the mass of the people, is another matter.
The nation of 6.3 million people is enjoying its longest run of economic growth since independence in 1975, seven years and counting. The government set a target many saw as fanciful: growing by 5 per cent a year after inflation by the end of this decade. This year, despite the international recession, it grew by 6.2 per cent and last month's budget forecast 8.5 per cent next year. But that is just warming up.
A few weeks ago, the PNG government signed a deal that promises to earn $35 billion in the next 30 years through the export of liquefied natural gas. The gas fields are to be developed in the Southern Highlands, with pipelines running 300km to the coast, then another 415km underwater to a processing plant outside
The project, a partnership between ExxonMobil, Australian company Oil Search, the PNG government and others, involves an investment of $16bn; this in a country whose gross domestic product was $13.7bn last year and whose exports are less than $6bn a year. Visitors say signs of the new affluence already are apparent in
Yet there is a sense of foreboding among many experts on PNG. What are the chance of the benefits from all this development flowing through to the mass of the population?
"Right now, I would say very little," says Jenny Hayward-Jones, a former Australian Department of Foreign Affairs officer who runs the
It is just that the past does not provide a great deal of confidence. At the time of independence, PNG ranked 77th out of 150 countries on the UN Human Development Index, which measures not only income but also factors such as education and life expectancy. Now, despite big projects such as Bougainville, Ok Tedi and Lihir, PNG comes 148th out of 182 countries, just above
Average life expectancy is 54 years and the infant mortality rate 64 per 1000 live births, much worse than the figures for indigenous people in
Prime Minister Michael Somare bridles at such figures, saying people in the villages always have plenty to eat. But in a paper commissioned by the Lowy Institute, Laurence Chandy, a former senior economist with the PNG government, says those in extreme poverty typically are malnourished, vulnerable to infectious diseases, poor harvests, natural disasters and crime and lack access to jobs, land, education, health care, clean water and transport.
Chandy quotes the PNG government's data: 35 per cent of births are supervised by healthcare professionals, 45 per cent of those of school-leaving age completed primary education and 27 per cent of the road network is considered to be in good condition.
Keith Jackson, a former teacher in PNG who subsequently held a senior position in the ABC, and Paul Oates, a former patrol officer, have calculated that health spending per person in PNG averages $38 a year, compared with $5461 for indigenous people in the
John Kleinig, a former teacher, says the school where he worked in Rabaul 40 years ago was better resourced than most schools in NSW at the time. A prime mover in a private charitable project in Oro Province that has set up a community-based program to provide resources and teacher training for schools, as well as health and agriculture programs, he says schools these days lack even the most basic resources, such as paper and pencils. "Teachers write lessons on the blackboard because, although textbooks exist, there generally is no money to purchase them," Kleinig says. Staffing schools is a problem, with teachers often suffering from diseases such as typhoid and malaria.
The Chandy paper points out that, despite recent high economic growth rates in PNG, in only three of the past six years have they exceeded the rapid rate of population growth. On one estimate, extreme poverty fell by 8.8 percentage points in the five years to 2008, though this was not enough to make up for the increase in the late 1990s and early part of this decade. Gross domestic product per capita remains below its 1996 level and will not catch up until 2014, assuming the government's growth forecasts are accurate.
Chandy diagnoses PNG's problem as the equivalent of bad circulation. Limited financial development and a rugged geography mean most transactions occur locally. Government revenue in the five years to 2008 rose from 23 per cent of GDP to almost 31 per cent but little has found its way to poor areas. Chandy says lack of public infrastructure isolates the poor and creates "a series of geographical poverty traps".
Some, including an urban elite, are benefiting. So are some landholders: Exxon recently handed out the equivalent of $500 per person to 1000 people under a benefit sharing agreement in an area where the company is building a large airstrip. This is more than the average annual household income of people in the area.
Corruption is one problem in PNG: Transparency International ranks it 151st out of 180 countries and says it is slipping further. The way the government does business does not help. Chandy says it justifies channelling funds, including cash transfers for individuals, through MPs and landowners as the best way of getting money to the poor. This method of distributing funds has grown from 15 per cent to 35 per cent of the development budget but there is no effective monitoring of the spending.
Chandy urges the PNG government to evaluate future foreign investment not just in terms of government revenue but its contribution to creating jobs. In the absence of a radically different approach by government, the LNG project and the high rate of economic growth accompanying it "will reinforce the existing structure of the economy in which the poor are largely excluded".
The time has come to assert more responsibility over PNG's national development, he said earlier this year, and part of that would involve an "aid exit strategy".
Hayward-Jones says that, while this makes sense in the long run, aid from
A FORTNIGHT ago,
Two cars, which had followed him, suddenly turned off the road and hemmed his vehicle in. He rammed one of the other cars, but three men leaped from the second, and began shooting at him.
A bullet went through his shoulder, and he slumped forward. He had hit his car horn to alert his family, and the attackers drove off. Manek said they had left him for dead. It was a miracle he survived, he said. Despite being dizzy from loss of blood, he drove to hospital.
He returned to work this week. But neither the police nor the Ombudsman Commission are saying where the investigation is heading, beyond Police Commissioner Gari Baki's routine pronouncement: "We are determined to get to the bottom of this."
Such violence might have been an opportunistic robbery, or a planned act over personal issues unrelated to Manek's job as corruption-buster.
The alternative is that it was a "professional" assassination attempt. That should be easier to solve, since the suspects would be limited to those under investigation by Manek -- though they include some of the country's most powerful politicians.
It would also fit into a pattern of politically motivated violence that has long marred PNG's public life.
Assassinations are not new to PNG. Before independence, in 1971, Australian district commissioner Jack Emmanuel was stabbed to death near Rabaul as the push for independence intensified. Prisons commissioner Pious Kerepia was also stabbed to death, at his home in
In 1989, there was an attempt to kill Australian judge Tos Barnett as he concluded an inquiry into corruption in the forest industry.
If the Manek shooting was politically driven, it encapsulates the cause of PNG's frustrating failure to improve living standards significantly over the past 30 years.
That cause is corruption. It is no coincidence that global corruption agency Transparency International rates it 154th out of 180 countries on its annual rating, with the 180th being the worst.
At independence in 1975, PNG was a reasonably well-run country with a great deal of optimism and an easy self-confidence. Civil society was strong, and crime rates modest. It caused a sensation when the Ombudsman announced a tribunal to consider the first minor leadership code breach for corruption, against a junior minister, Moses Sasakila. The "Gang of Four" top public servants, two of whom -- Mekere Morauta and Rabbie Namaliu -- went on to become prime ministers, were politically blocked when they went out on a limb to urge a tough new leadership code to contain such incipient corruption.
This, in hindsight, was the nation's crucial turning point. Corruption has turned into the virus which has undermined governments' capacity to deliver the services essential for the progress in living standards to which Papua New Guineans feel entitled, given the country's stream of successful resource projects, its massive aid injections, and its underlying agricultural base. What chance is there, then, that PNG can manage effectively the huge Exxon Mobil-led liquefied natural gas project, which will be by far the biggest the
Construction, which starts next year, will cost almost double this year's $9.4 billion gross domestic product.
Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare -- who has championed a second LNG project -- acknowledged the extent of this challenge in a speech to his own staff Christmas party on Tuesday.
He admitted: "We have not trained our people for the projects, which will require between 8000 and 10,000 workers."
Exxon, he said, was asking for 500 drivers. "How do we get 500 drivers in a day?" The answer is that they will come from largely Asian guest workers, likely to live in a camp to be built near
How, Somare asked, can PNG plan to use the vast funds that will start to flow when the Exxon project begins producing in 2014? The answer is by setting up a sovereign wealth fund to capture revenues deemed as surplus to routine requirements, and investing them for the longer term.
But recently, when the 2010 budget was handed down, Treasury Secretary Simon Tosali described the massive drawdowns from trust accounts this year as "excessive government spending".
A high proportion of government spending is now paid out by cheque to individual MPs, who provide little or no accounting for the development projects they claim to assist.
Last year, the Auditor General said corrupt officials had stolen about $360m annually in recent years. Isaac Lupari, the government's top bureaucrat, was sacked for failing to establish an inquiry into $80m missing from the finance department's accounts.
Freedom House, a Washington-based organisation that researches democracy and freedom around the world, said in a recent report: "The Ombudsman Commission has named the police department PNG's most corrupt government agency. The correctional service is short of staff, and prison conditions are poor. Prison breaks are not uncommon.
"Serious crimes, including firearms smuggling, rape, murder, and drug trafficking, continue to increase. Weak governance and law enforcement are said to have made PNG a base for many Asian organised crime groups
"Tribal feuds over land, titles, religious beliefs, and perceived insults frequently lead to violence and deaths. Inadequate law enforcement and the increased availability of guns have exacerbated this problem. Violence against women is widespread. Attacks on ethnic Chinese and their businesses have become more frequent in recent years."
Chronox Manek is unlikely to be the last victim.
Malum: Regarding this item, I myself gave K2000 -( I was born in Sri lanka and my family goes back there to around 1660)-to a fund raised in Mt Hagen by a Sri Lankan and never received any news of what happened to the money. Most unsatisfactory- it happens too often.
John
COLOMBO – Nearly half a billion dollars in tsunami aid for Sri Lanka is unaccounted for and over 600 million dollars has been spent on projects unrelated to the disaster, an anti-corruption watchdog said Saturday.
Berlin-based Transparency International demanded an audit of the money received by the Sri Lankan government to help victims of the Asian tsunami which hit the island on December 26, 2004, killing 31,000 people.
The group's Sri Lankan chapter said the public have a right to know how the aid money was spent as the tropical nation marked the fifth anniversary of the tsunami.
The group alleged that out of 2.2 billion dollars received for relief, 603.4 million dollars was spent on projects unrelated to the disaster.
Another half a billion dollars was missing, the group said.
"There is no precise evidence to explain the missing sum of 471.9 million dollars," the Transparency International statement issued in Colombo added.
An "audit should be done by the government to explain the utilisation of the money received and the challenges faced," the group said.
An government official declined comment Saturday on the allegations but Colombo has consistently rejected such accusations in the past.
An initial government audit in 2005 found that less than 13 percent of the aid had been spent, but there has been no formal examination since, Transparency International said.
This post was submitted by AFP.
Wandamu Palau of NARI on a practical during poultry training in Japan+with+poultry+training+participantsin+Japan.JPG)
Wandamu Palau of NARI (standing second from right) with poultry training participantsin JapanI had a quite Christmas with my children and am now back at work here at The National newspaper, all fired up and raring to face the New Year 2010.
I pretty much stayed at home with my kids over the last two days, as well as caught up on some much-needed sleep.
At Gerehu, next to where I live, we had the launching of our new fountain by National Capital District Governor Powes Parkop on Christmas evening.
My elder son, Jr Malum, is still in Lae, has been since my Mum’s passing in September, so I only had Gedi (7), Moasing (5) and Keith (2) to keep me company.
I’m looking to Jr joining us later this week.
