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Address By

The Prime Minister & Regional Member For East Sepik

At the 33rd Anniversary Of Independence

My Beloved People of East Sepik

Nau em taim blong mi long wokim traipela stori long yupela.

Who would have thought that I would be standing here 40 years on addressing you at our 33rd anniversary of Independence and nationhood?

Through your trust in me I have been re-elected time and time again since 1968. But in that 40 year timeframe, I have been in and out of government.

In the 40 years as your Regional Member I have spent 17 years or so in various  positions within government and in Opposition and for a short period governor of East Sepik. My total number of years as Prime Minister is now 15 since 1975.

After years of confidence that you have bestowed upon me I am happy to be back as Prime Minister and been very busy mending and putting together pieces that have been broken over a period of time.

Though slow, there is still work behind the scenes to improve the performance of our public service so that the delivery of services can be restored. Again this deterioration has happened over a period of time and it will take some time too to get it back where it should be.

This restoration work is not easy. But little by little in these last six years we have been rebuilding the foundations.

In doing so, we have also raised the expectations of our people. We have been the government that has shown responsibility in handling our country’s finances and putting monies straight into the districts.

The fruits of this exercise will not be seen overnight but in due course with our Joint District Budget Priority & Planning Committees becoming more familiar with procedures, they will be able to implement change in each of our districts.

Never before have we addressed rural development in such a manner by investing heavily through resource allocation in each of the 89 districts.

There are at least 4 million Kina in each of the 89 districts per year since 2007 for health, education, water supply, law and order and transport infrastructure development. A total of 356 million Kina of our annual budget is going straight to our rural and urban districts.

It is up to each of you to make sure that the members of your Joint District Budget Priority & Planning Committee headed by your Open Member are carrying out their responsibility in making these funds work in these appropriate areas in your district.

By now you should be seeing some developments taking place.

We are addressing rural development in this manner as we take on the serious task of reforming our public service machinery.

Another way of restoring services while improving the functions of the public service machinery is through the government’s public private partnership policy.

This government in its last term introduced the district roll out programme. In partnership with other agencies of government and the private sector we hope to reintroduce banking, postal and other services to operate in rural areas from under one roof.

Recently, we announced our largest private public partnership in selling part of B Mobile.

By bringing in the private sector to work with government agencies we also hope to introduce the business culture into our statutory institutions.

B Mobile remains largely a nationally owned company. In this partnership B Mobile has new capital injection for further growth and value added service to its customers.

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHALLENGES

During my 28th anniversary address, I called for Papua New Guinea to also achieve economic independence.

While no nation in the world is totally independent, I would still like to see that PNG replaces imported food with locally grown produce; that we replace other imported items for locally produced ones.

Our province of East Sepik can provide all the staples for our country if our provincial policies focussed on achieving that goal. We can grow rice, sago, taro, yams, farm chickens, pigs, cattle and more.

I am pleased to inform you that there are plans in place now for us to realize these developments. We recently signed an agreement with the commercial government body in the province of Sarawak in Malaysia to integrate the development of agriculture in this province.

They have been successful in commercialising all the crops that we have such as sago, palm oil, rubber including rice, cocoa and copra.

If we were to properly harness these opportunities there should be no one loitering aimlessly in our streets in villages and towns complaining that there are not enough jobs.

Everyone gets to create their own jobs and income by farming their own land.

At the moment we have semi skilled workers in our urban areas who are earning less than K1,000 per month.

On their own land with current commodity prices, cocoa farmers are getting around K250 per bag. On average a farmer may bring in 4 bags to market per fortnight which means in a month he gets K2,000 and if he works hard he can get more.

Why should our people work for meagre wages in major towns and cities when they can earn more on their own land?

Furthermore this is export revenue, new money coming in and not the same money circulating within our economy.

People of East Sepik,

Part of our problem in the delivery of services is our own lack of engagement. I give an example in education but it applies to other government services too. If you know that your children are going to school and teachers are not turning up or if resources are not available it is your responsibility to rally with other parents and demand that service.

Teachers, doctors, nurses in the system are emboldened by your lack of action. They think it is OK to skip classes, drink during office hours and neglect their duties. We have had deaths in hospitals because of this kind of negligence and you the victims must start speaking up for yourselves too. It is a problem for government but you too can help.

EDUCATION

Our added challenge as a government is our population growth that stretches efforts in service delivery. Currently there are 37,000 teachers and over a million students enrolled in 4,000 elementary schools, 3,300 primary schools and 140 vocational centres.

With the national education plan of 2005 – 2014 strategies are in place to ensure continued development in the education sector.

The government continues to provide funding support for education reforms. Apart from the ongoing budget, government recently provided K260 million for school infrastructure and materials.

HEALTH & HIVAIDS

Our population growth also poses a challenge on our delivery of health services. Our rates of infant and maternal mortality and birth rate are still high.

Funding of our social sectors was reduced some years back and is only now being increased to reflect our population growth.

We have provided funds in recent years for outstanding allowances to our doctors and nurses. The recent awards for nurses will be taken care of in the 2009 budget. We have also allocated funds for housing developments for nurses and are also looking after housing concerns for doctors.

Sadly we have still such a small ratio of doctors per head of population. We are also losing our professionals not just in health to better paid jobs outside of government.

But this is a worldwide phenomena and the government will continue to look at ways of getting more doctors in the public sector as well as training new ones.

I still believe however, that with the resources that the government provides annually there should be better distribution of medical supplies to our aid posts and clinics.

We have also through the district development funds provided money for infrastructure in district health facilities.

HIV/AIDS

Government through the department of Health and the National Aids Council Secretariat has generated a lot of awareness in urban areas on HIV/AIDS but must now take these programmes out to our rural areas.

With continued fear and discrimination, we will not be able to control the spread of HIV/AIDS.
The virus is already here and all we can do now is deal with it - guided by our Christian and Melanesian philosophies of good healthy living and care for those living with the disease.

FORESTRY & FISHERIES

While I have already mentioned agriculture in East Sepik I just want to acknowledge that the forestry and fisheries sectors are still generating much of our national income. But we must now be looking at more sustainable options for generating wealth and employment in our country.

TOURISM

We all know that tourism is a sustainable industry for PNG. We are rich with wildlife, beautiful landscapes and the list goes on.

With rekindled interest in PNG, coupled with the construction boom, government has provided incentives for infrastructure development in the tourism industry. We have had heaps of regional conferences this year alone. Hotels in our main centres including Wewak are continuously full.

I know that this growth will continue for some years to come if we can also maintain political stability.

(Liquefied Natural Gas) LNG Project

Fuel to run our cars and industries is currently the hot issue and concern to everyone. We all know that fuel prices are determined by world market price and I am relieved to see that it has dropped a little over the past few weeks.

However this may not prevail and we must seek other options especially when we want to roll out our rural electrification programme.

With the recent Liquefied Natural Gas Agreement with a consortium of companies led by ExxonMobil, we are looking at exporting gas with the option of using it also as an alternative for power generation.

The 10 billion US Dollar LNG project will make a huge difference to our national economy.

Suspicious people are corrupting the minds of our people. They think that because a deal has been struck, there is some foul play going on. I can assure you, people of East Sepik that this is the best deal that PNG has struck in a very long time.

We will find that we lack capacity to be able to really harness the opportunities that will come about as a result of this huge project. But we as a nation are not new to  challenges and I believe we will continue to shock critics because we seem to always beat the odds.

Before Independence and still today, many so called experts have been predicting the demise of Papua New Guinea.

They said our institutions weren’t developed enough so democracy would collapse within 10 years of Independence.

Well, people of East Sepik, democracy is still here after 33 years as one people of one nation!

So let’s put our hands together for ourselves and 33 years of unity and self determination!

Papua New Guineans are good people and every difficult day that I have in politics I know that it is all worth it.

I am very fortunate that in my life time I also see the gratitude of my people. I have been honoured in many ways by the people of East Sepik and PNG as a whole.

I acknowledge the generosity of the New Ireland and Manus people who recently celebrated with me my 40th anniversary.

To the people of this province, you are not pushovers and it has given me great satisfaction in leading a province of proud people who are rarely intimidated by others.

This is the strength of the Sepik people but it must not be confused with arrogance and bigheadedness. We can have strong character and use it well for good intent and purposes.

One day I will no longer be your leader. I want this unity that exists today to prevail. May Sepiks continue to be great peacemakers who will keep our country together.

After 33 years of nationhood, let’s continue to prove these experts wrong!

I wish you all Happy anniversary and may God continue to bless our people and our country.