Any one of us who thinks that our PNG colleges and universities (including Divine Word Uni) are universities in a real sense, or provide our students with a quality education, has obviously either not taken a recent walk around UPNG or have a basis to compare our universities with.

A recent report by Australian economist Ross Garnaut and Sir Rabbie Namaliu explored the status of PNG colleges and universities. They came up with some very bad news for us.

The full report itself can be found here:

http://www.rossgarnaut.com.au/Documents/PNGUniversitiesReview310510v7.pdf


Here is a background to the above report:


Today, PNG is growing much faster than Australia economically and in population, and "will potentially become an important partner in a lot of ways as its economy matures".

Professor Ross Garnaut says the most productive aid Australia has given PNG was its investment in the country's two universities in the 1960s. "The exceptional absence of even secondary, let alone tertiary, education" was an extraordinary feature of the run-up to independence, compared with other countries, he says. Only the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he adds, might compare in its lack of an educated elite at independence.

The first graduates of UPNG emerged in 1970, just three years before self-government. Several of that group shot into top jobs, becoming public service heads by independence in 1975.

"It was a compressed program," Garnaut says. "Part of the story was how successful this was, how weak the base, and how well a small number of Papua New Guineans did in accepting high responsibilities."

This was chiefly because UPNG and the University of Technology in Lae swiftly achieved the standard of a middle-ranking Australian university. Garnaut says UPNG was "a very richly resourced university. Very expensive, but very productive."

But real expenditure per student has fallen to less than 10 per cent of what it was 35 years ago. "And that is a general feature of public expenditure in PNG."

Namaliu and Garnaut could not find a case anywhere in the world of such a collapse in spending. "The focus of our report," he says, "is on the necessity of raising the quality of the universities." There is also substantial pressure for expansion, he adds, but this should be resisted until many other issues are addressed.

Overall in PNG, "it's a very sad story of service delivery, especially in rural PNG". Health, education, local transport, agricultural extension, services that were most highly prized at independence, have all declined in quality, he says, adding that the first cause is the real decline in public expenditure.

"There has been a diversion of funds for private benefit, governance problems and administrative weakness. You won't solve the problem of underperformance by solving one of them. You have to solve the lot."

Garnaut says many of PNG's regulations and systems have remained intact from Australian colonial days, not keeping pace with Australian reforms, although there are exceptions such as the running of the central bank.

"If one thinks of manna from heaven descending on PNG," from resource earnings and Australian aid, "then the real manna was much higher at independence than at any time until the past few years," Garnaut says.

December 16th 2011
PAPUA NEW GUINEA IS A TINDERBOX

By Doug Hendrie

The violence in PNG this week is the eruption of long simmering tensions, says Martyn Namorong. Doug Hendrie talks to the fearless political blogger who sells betel nut by day and tackles the country's corrupt ruling classes by night.

Martyn Namorong is angry.

And he’s got a right to be. From the poorest province in Papua New Guinea, Namorong was able to come to the capital, Port Moresby, to study medicine. His future seemed certain. Instead, he dropped out of medical school and had to make his living on the street, selling betelnut.

As he sat at his small stall, he watched the urban poor fight to survive, and he began wondering why this was so.

Since independence from Australia in 1975, the state had slowly and steadily atrophied, forcing ordinary Papuans to rely on old methods to survive: intensive food gardens in their communally owned land (which accounts for around 97 per cent of the entire country). Widespread corruption funnelling money from mining and logging companies to the Port Moresby political classes had entrenched a sense of abandonment among the urban poor, villagers who had moved to the big city hoping
to find work or forced to leave as the rural population swells.

Namorong watched all this, and wondered, and his anger grew.

He began penning missives on his blog, the Namorong Report, excoriating the political and economic system in PNG. His focus shifted from medical and public health issues to the wider picture. In 2011, he won the PNG’s top award, the Crocodile Prize, for essay writing. He wrote:

"I always thought all my life that I was destined to great things and make a difference to humanity. Today, faced with the uncertainty about the future and the hardship of living in the city, I’m more concerned with being able to survive each day. I am more concerned about my own welfare than saving the world.

"The system of education in this country is a failure trap. It is supposed to groom Papua New Guineans but all it does is it produces a lot of failures. In grade 8 ten thousands get thrown out, in grade 10 and 12 thousands more fall through the crack in the system. This is the failure trap. Students spend much of their lives learning about
ideas in arts, science and mathematics and are not prepared for both the cash economy and the subsistence economy. I my case, I regret going to medical school because now I am just an unskilled person. I am definitely not skilled to survive in the savannah of East TransFly nor do I have formal qualifications to be recognised in the cash economy. Thus by default I sell betel nut on the street like many other disenfranchised people.

"I don’t dream anymore, I am grounded in the reality. I grapple with the facts as they are. Perhaps there are too many visionaries and dreamers such that no one is there to deal with the reality of life in Papua New Guinea. Even a vast majority of people who a trapped like me do not wish to deal with reality. That is why fast money schemes
continue to thrive and voters are gullible towards politicians."

Emboldened by the success of his essay, Namorong began aiming directly at the corrupt political-business nexus which rules the remnants of the state. He joined a growing group of writers on blogs like Edebamona and PNG Exposed who are unafraid to speak boldly of the issues holding their country back, and challenging the mainstream media.

The mass media in Papua New Guinea lacks clout. The two main newspapers, The National, and the Post-Courier, rarely report on the widespread corruption and webs of influence between Port Moresby’s political elite — the only guaranteed way to wealth in the country — and large businesses, Western and increasingly, Asian.

The National is owned by Malaysian logging giant, Rimbunan Hijau, and never comments negatively on controversies over logging on communally owned land across the heavily forested country.

Murdoch’s Post Courier regularly runs press releases or one-sided commentary, and though there are journalists like Simon Eroro, who won the News Limited "Scoop of the Year" this year for his undercover investigation into the movements of West Papuan nationalist militia across the border into PNG, the media is largely cobbled. Chomsky’s
notion of "flak" — negative feedback or threats as a method to control the media — is at work in PNG, where a story exposing corruption can force a journalist to go into hiding, along with his or her entire family. But the much-delayed roll-out of the internet in Papua New Guinea has seen a gradual shift towards more open criticism.

Namorong is not afraid of the powers that be. He draws strength from postcolonial African writers like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, particularly his book, Decolonising the Mind, and a sense of fearlessness inspired by desperation.

"I figured that as a young disenfranchised Papua New Guinean in an urban setting, I probably didn’t have a long life-expectancy," he says.

"I didn’t wanna die in silence. I knew I had a good grasp of English and an understanding of the undercurrent of society and so I put the two together. There is no difference in what drives me to write with what drives a young man to steal a vehicle and get killed by the cops. We both have nothing to lose. Once one has lost everything and has no hope of any future prospects one lives recklessly. I’d be glad the day some guy puts a bullet in my head because I told the truth. The motto on my blog is a quote from Aung San Suu Kyii: ‘Real freedom is freedom from fear’. I don’t fear death and that gives me the freedom to write."

Namorong’s wellspring is neither nationalism nor patriotism. "These are Western concepts," he says. Instead, he casts himself as an indigenous Melanesian:

"I am an indigenous Melanesian. My people have been independent spiritually, economically, politically and culturally for over 50,000 years. The Independent State of Papua New Guinea was a western concept created to serve western interests and it has done so for over 36 years at the expense of indigenous Melanesians. I refuse to be
associated with a corrupt system that has destroyed the Fly River, killed 15,000 people on Bougainville, stolen 5.2 million hectares of customary land and uses the police force to brutalise indigenous Melanesians. I defend the dignity of a free and ancient people."

For Namorong, the driver for change will come from the privatisation of communal wealth, of customary land.

"Once private interests subdue the traditional Melanesian social institutions, problems of all kinds arise. Privatisation of national and communal wealth is un-Melanesian. It is what generates the disparities in income distribution and
corruption," he says.

It is Namorong’s outspokenness which has attracted others who feel the same tide of tension and rage building up in Papua New Guinea’s cities and regions. It has become real with a uptick in the number of ethnic clashes in Port Moresby and anti-Chinese riots. But as yet, the anger of the growing dispossessed urban poor has yet to target politicians. That’s out of a longstanding respect for the chief, the big-man.

But this week, things may change.

Papua New Guinea now has two governments, led by rivals Sir Michael Somare and Peter O’Neill, each claiming legitimacy, and each appointing their own governor general, police chief and speaker. Unrest in the capital is growing. There are rumours that each side is flying in more members of their respective tribes — Sepik for Somare,
highlanders for O’Neill.

To Namorong, this is the latest sign that Papua New Guineans are boiling, following miner strikes, recent riots in Lae, the second largest city, and angry protests against the controversial Special Purpose Agricultural and Business Leases, which effectively
transferred communal land to mining or logging companies.

"When I was writing earlier this year, I thought the impact would be felt 15 to 20 years down the line. But as more and more people around the country realise we’re being ripped-off big-time, conversations have now shifted towards next year’s elections," he says.

"We have undeserved respect and hope in incompetent big-men to be messiahs. But the elections will spark off widespread unrest. PNG is a tinderbox. The kids just need to strike the matches."

Sobering...troubling...

Have been following Martyn's posts for a while...a brilliant young man who speaks for the many defranchised/demarginalised of this nation/society. Hope there are many more with the courage of Martyn
to do waht he is doing.

M-n

I reckon that if there were many more with the courage of Martyn, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now. There would have been a people power backlash against corruption years ago if there were more Martyns, and we wouldn't see the incredible ripoff to PNG that the LNG project and the mines represent. There is not one Martyn amongst any of us here on Scape. We shouldn't be blaming our politicians too much. WE the sheeple of PNG are the nation's greatest problem.

That is why change must begin with ME. Change must start with me. I must convince myself that I can become a better citizen.Martyn is not alone, there are many of us out there but we are simply not speaking out and causing the change within ourselves.

Everyone who is a true intellectual should read the report that is in the link. If you have kids at uni, you can consider that you might have spent a helluva lot of money giving your kids a very poor education, far worse than what you, as a parent, probably got when you went to uni.

Today we spend only 10% of what was spent at Independence (how could things have gotten that bad) on the PNG universities.

Peter Ipatas thinks that stuffing classrooms with more students and building more classrooms that have nothing inside will lead to quality education. Whadda laugh!

Person who does not agree with Peter Ipatas is in his own world. Governor Peter is providing the Resources - classrooms -teachers - its the pupils that have to use these things to educate themselves. Agree with prevoius writer - it me, myself the biggest hurdle to overcome. No body will do it for you - its myself. So thanks Peter for providing - if though I am not an Engan.

Peter Ipatas thinks that classrooms and teachers are enough to give kids a great education.

Developed countries think that teachers in classrooms filled with books, lab equipment, posters, and other educational resources are the ONLY way for kids to get a great education.

See the difference?

if learning was up to the person then why do we have to get into a class and a teacher teach us. In Enga it is a normal situation where teachers don't come and students spend the whole day in class. Especially in the lower graded students need all sorts of teaching and educating medium to help them learn. Whether its interactive games,picture books,videos ect.

You're right, the students need those things. The good students, you'll notice, learn how to teach themselves, using books and other resources. As time goes by, they need teachers less and less to teach them.

The problem with our unis is that everything is run down, the facilities are often broken down and there's no supplies or books except for those no one wanted to steal!

Who else in these bunch of current governors can do better than what Ipatas is doing? He may has his own political and social standings like anyone else but his funding in education in the province is extra ordinary. If someone hates him in politics, his initiative in funding Enga's future is not a genuine point to attack him on. And when your time comes, you can continue and improve from where it stops!

The whole point is that he isn't spending the money in a way that's gonna make any difference. Half educateds are still coming out of Enga schools. Neither LNG nor anyone else wants to hire them, haven't you already noticed that?

While he's taking the initiative for a better Enga to take the stress off parents paying school fees and etc and that’s true.
However, bear in mind that pass or fail stops with the individual student. These initiatives are not for any student to fail in 8/10/12 grades but to strive for the best and qualified at a tertiary institution whether be tech, college or uni. Not to finish high school and go on a no luck job search!
Action Governor may not be good but he's still Genuine!

How do you know that Action Governor is genuine. I reckon he's learnt that talking a lot about supporting education (without the actual quality of what is being learnt improving) is the cheapest way possible of buying votes. Parents vote for candidates who talk about supporting education. Thus, this may be nothing more than political strategy on the part of Peter Ipatas, which certainly isn't evidence that he's genuine at all!

Besides, anyone who contracts AIDS from someone who isn't their wife is hardly a person you would expect to be 'genuine' or honest about anything!

Those who think Ipatas is doing the right thing in education need to download the full education review report (in the first posting of this thread) and READ IT. Ipatas is trying to create little colleges in Enga. The report says this WILL NOT WORK because of economic issues.