A Generation Betrayed: How Waigani Abandoned PNG's Youth

by Kendal Kandakasi

Make no mistake: Papua New Guinea is not failing its young people by accident. It is failing them by design, by laziness, and by political cowardice. A nation where more than 60 percent of citizens are under 25 is led by a government that treats its youth as a public-relations prop, a statistic to be photographed at stadium launches, and a problem to be deported under the friendly label of "labour mobility." The Marape-Rosso administration's record on youth employment is not a story of progress. It is a story of betrayal.

Consider the Prime Minister's own astonishing confession. He stood in Port Moresby and announced that "for the first time since 1975" his government was taking the issue of youth employment seriously. Pause and read that again. Half a century. Two full generations born, raised and discarded before anyone in Waigani thought their employment was worth taking "seriously." And we are supposed to applaud? This is not leadership. This is the political class apologising for its own irrelevance and expecting a medal for it.

The boasts get worse the closer you look. The flagship Medium Term Development Plan IV promises a million jobs over the next five years and a K200 billion economy, a fantasy mounted on top of an economy forecast to grow only from K124 billion in 2024 to K137 billion in 2025. A million jobs from a state that, by Marape's own admission, runs programs that are not reaching the youth because government agencies are failing to make them visible, accessible, and understandable. You cannot deliver a million jobs through ministries that cannot deliver a brochure.

And where are those jobs supposed to come from? Not from the K28.357 billion 2025 National Budget, which lavishes money on police, defence, debt repair and capital infrastructure while offering no serious, ring-fenced youth employment line. Not from the SME "revolution," which still leaves rural and settlement youth locked out of credit. Not from FODE certificates handed to young people who then walk into a labour market that does not exist. The government has perfected the art of issuing qualifications no economy is waiting to absorb.

So what is the great Marape-Rosso answer? Sell our children abroad. Ship them to Queensland orchards and Marlborough vineyards, then crow that they are earning up to K52,000 as if that proves anything except our domestic failure. A serious nation does not measure success by the remittances of its exiled youth. The labour mobility scheme is not a triumph; it is a confession in green and gold uniform. And when shipping them overseas is not enough, Waigani's instinct is to militarise the rest, drafting them into churches, a national service program, and police, defence force and CIS reservist ranks, as though unemployment were a discipline issue to be solved with boots and Bibles.

The bill for this contempt is paid in fire. The January 2024 Port Moresby riots were not freak weather. They were the harvest of two decades of neglect. The Prime Minister himself warned his cabinet that if we are not conscious and actively doing something to address this increasing youth bulge, we are not safe from destruction. The man diagnosing the disease is the doctor who let it metastasise.

Defenders will mutter about Connect PNG, FODE, fiscal repair, and the long road ahead. Fine. But you cannot eat a road, you cannot feed a family on a press release, and you cannot tell a hungry twenty-year-old that the surplus arrives in 2027. PNG's youth do not need another summit. They need a government that fears their unemployment more than it fears its own donors. Until that day comes, this generation will keep being betrayed by the leaders sworn to serve it.