WHILE PNG BURNS, MARAPE JETS TO CHINA

M.J.Passingan

While Papua New Guinea’s economy, society, and institutions bleed from self-inflicted wounds, Prime Minister James Marape has once again chosen the skies. He boarded a charter flight to China, entourage in tow business associates, minders, and hangers-on to tour corporate headquarters in Guangzhou and shake hands with officials. This is not diplomacy. This is desertion. At the precise moment the country confronts multiple overlapping crises, Marape has absented himself, leaving ordinary citizens and the thousands of university graduates walking out of lecture halls this week to fend for themselves.

Seven years into this government, the ledger of failure is damning. The kina has lost more than 40 percent of its value against the US dollar since 2014. Import costs have exploded. A 10-kilogram bag of rice now retails above K70 in many provinces; a litre of fuel sits stubbornly above K4.50 at the pump. Families ration meals. Trade-store owners watch shelves empty and cannot restock. Taxi and PMV drivers park their vehicles because the sums no longer add up. This is not a “global headwind” it is policy-induced pain.

The fiscal picture is equally bleak. Sovereign debt has ballooned to K66 billion over 50 percent of GDP with no credible repayment strategy in sight. In February 2026, the FATF grey-listed Papua New Guinea, freezing correspondent banking relationships and scaring off the foreign capital the country desperately needs. Budget execution rates have languished below 70 percent for years; billions earmarked for health clinics, schools, and roads simply never materialise. The National ID system, despite hundreds of millions spent, remains a ghost project. The 2021 Census was so poorly executed that its data cannot be trusted for planning anything not schools, not hospitals, not electoral boundaries.

Policy creativity has been reserved for the punitive. The Vagrancy Act seeks to criminalise the informal economy that sustains an estimated 85 percent of Papua New Guineans. SME policy is effectively non-existent. There is no industrial strategy, no skills pipeline, no incentives to turn the graduates of 2026 into taxpayers and nation-builders. Instead, young people emerge from hardship power blackouts, pandemic learning losses, crumbling infrastructure only to discover an economy that has no place for them.

Marape’s frequent-flyer record compounds the insult. He has jetted to China, Singapore, Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Pacific capitals with great fanfare. Each trip was sold as a breakthrough. None delivered measurable jobs, sustained investment, or structural reform. Bilateral memoranda gather dust. Pledged billions never arrive. These junkets have become a pattern: a Prime Minister in permanent denial, using international stages to project relevance while domestic governance collapses.

The symbolism this week is brutal. While Marape dines in Guangzhou, thousands of proud, capable young Papua New Guineans are graduating. They studied through blackouts and uncertainty. They earned their degrees. Yet the nation offers them no growth sectors, no investment pipeline, no future. Leadership’s response is silence and another overseas photo-op.