The political leaders we elect to the National Parliament every five years continue to take us to unchartered areas of political discourse and management of our collective socio-economic future.

They continue to make decisions and take actions that often upset us or surprise us the citizens.

Take for example, the “Reserved Business list” for Papua New Guineans that our far-sighted founding fathers put in place at Independence for us to be engaged in and build our livelihoods up as viable citizens. We never thought the Reserved Business List would be removed in the mid-1990s. But our MPs as legislators did it. Today, we have an influx of foreigners, particularly from Asia, engaged in business activities and jobs that were reserved for Papua New Guineans at Independence by our founding fathers. Think about it. Does Papua New Guinea need a foreign shop assistant or shop floor supervisor? if foreigners are working here as shop floor supervisors and even cooking “flour balls” and chips, at the corner shop down the road, where do the graduates from the many private business schools, vocational centres and technical schools go? Do we still have skills shortage at the lower end of the supervisory and management roles in shops and kaibars for example, that we need foreigners?

We have more educated people at different levels of education and there has been a significant growth in population compared to what we were at Independence 45 years ago. Our population was under two million at Independence in 1975and in 2020 we are about 10 million. There must be capable Papua New Guineans among the 10 million of us, compared to 1975, who can do the jobs that foreigners are now occupying. Who monitors the many logging camps where hordes of foreigners are operating riggers, front-end loaders and chainsaws even? The same goes for the fishing industry where foreigners are dominant and leave Papua New Guineans to perform the minimal roles under the watch of the foreigners?

Today, one would have thought all the menial and semi-skilled jobs and the “reserved businesses” would be 100 per cent occupied by Papua New Guineans. But no. This is not the case. This is a national tragedy that affects our people and the economic well-being of the country in terms of loss of tax revenue and the repatriation of earnings by the foreign workers to their home countries and so forth. In other words, our people are progressively being displaced by foreigners who are here in a significant way in the former “reserved business list” space.

This is one of the biggest blunders that our MPs have committed against us the citizens by their decision and action in the mid-1990s to remove the reserve business list. It now appears that when the MPs removed the reserved business list, they did not consider the implications and effects, we are feeling today. There is a youth bulge and so many wrongly labelled school “drop outs” of our education system at different levels are out there. The formal government system seems to no place for them with so-much lip service being delivered to address the growing youth and particularly unemployment. We must ask whether many of these “drop outs” would have found themselves economically occupied in any of the small enterprises within the “reserved business list” if the MPs did not remove the list in the mid-1990s? Such a question needs to be asked.

Another related surprise from the MPs is the big talk about government support for the small to medium enterprises (SME). This big talk has been going on for over a decade and we are still talking about it in the formal and informal circles about SME support by the government. Recently, the government announced a whopping K200 million SME loan facility to be parked at the Bank South Pacific and the state-owned National Development Bank. It sounds good on paper. But how many of our school dropouts and unemployed people and the ordinary people in the 89 districts know about this and are the mechanisms and requirements for accessing the SME loan congruent for the majority of our people?

Will majority of the SME loan funds be accessed by our ordinary people in the 89 districts or will it be another funding source for the well-connected and educated “haves” in the Port Moresby and major urban centres where the bank branches are located? What are the mechanisms in place to make it easy for the ordinary people in the 89 districts to access this SME loan package? I would be interested to see the list of clients that successfully accessed the K200 million SME loan package when all is done and dusted. I would want to know how many of the loan recipients were ordinary people or family businesses in the 89 districts and how much went to the well-connected elite of Port Moresby and the major urban centres. My point in this discussion is that our elected representatives in the National Parliament must not surprise and disappoint us with their decisions and actions as in the case of number of areas highlighted above. We must feel confident in their decision-making and actions. We deserve better than surprises and disappointments as our MPs have just done with the events surrounding the two Parliament sittings on 13 November 2020 and 17^th November 2020. These surprise actions of our MPs are now matters which have gone to the Supreme Court for arbitration.