Recycled Corruption: Wereh's Return Hands the Fixer the Master Key

By: PAUL L. KEBAIJA

David Wereh is back in the engine room. The former Works Secretary quietly removed amid allegations of abuse of office and inflated contracts, then parked in an ambassadorship until the heat cooled has been parachuted in as interim CEO of the new National Monitoring and Coordination Authority. In last weeks defensive interview he sold the NMCA as a neutral oversight body. The reality is uglier. The man who signed off on Connect PNG payments has just been handed the power to monitor every major government project in the country.

Wereh did not merely administer roads. He sat at the valve controlling the flow of billions under Connect PNG, a programme dogged by persistent reports that payments were steered toward companies linked to the Prime Minister and his inner circle. The same networks that produced questionable contracts and bloated costs are now being shielded by a new central authority that conveniently sidelines the Department of National Planning and Monitoring. NMCA does not strengthen accountability. It relocates control to where the Prime Minister's office has long wanted it under one roof, under one trusted hand.

The personal geometry makes the conflict obscene. Wereh is a close friend of John Kaiyo, his former deputy at Works and the operational fixer running Marape's flagship infrastructure projects. UNITECH classmates turned bureaucratic partners, they have moved through PNG's public works machinery in lockstep for years. Installing Wereh as monitor-in-chief is not reform it is handing the master key to the same small circle that already decided who got paid and how much.

To understand why this appointment matters, follow the trail of companies and confidants that have orbited the Prime Minister since 2019.

Start with Connect PNG itself. Former Prime Minister Peter O'Neill, armed with what he says are leaked Department of Finance records, has alleged that Ipwenz Construction a company he claims is owned by Marape's close relative Moses Palipe was awarded contracts totalling over K3.5 billion under the programme. O'Neill further alleges that Palipe played a role in transporting cash to Tari during the 2022 National General Election, and has named four other companies Amaku and Sons Construction, Construct Oceanic, CivPac, and Albe Ltd that he says have received public money under similar circumstances. Marape denies any shareholding in these companies; the allegations remain on the public record and untested.

The Connect PNG ledger itself raises eyebrows beyond the headline contractors. Leaked records said to cover April 2021 to January 2024 catalogue roughly 1,400 separate payments totalling just under K2 billion over two and a half years, including line items as bizarre as payments to a private hospital for a Works Minister's medical expenses, a cash transfer for an individual's accommodation in the UK, payments to an MP-owned newspaper, late-payment interest extended to one favoured contractor but no others, and a hotel bill for soldiers guarding a road project. A parliamentary committee has since heard that roughly K4.5 billion in contracts were approved without the trust fund mandated by the Connect PNG Act ever being established funds drawn instead "directly from the national budget", leaving the programme, in the committee's words, in a "legal vacuum". The man defending that arrangement at the inquiry? David Wereh.

Then there is the UBS legacy that follows Marape from his time as Treasurer. The 2014 UBS loan used to buy Oil Search shares was found by the Ombudsman Commission to have broken as many as fifteen laws, and cost the State over A$420 million when the shares collapsed. A subsequent Brattle Group analysis submitted to the Commission of Inquiry estimated that UBS overcharged PNG by roughly A$175 million across the loan tranches more than half of the total fees paid. Marape was Finance Minister when the deal was waved through; the Ombudsman Commission recommended a leadership tribunal against both him and O'Neill before he engineered the political pivot that made him Prime Minister.

The pattern of personally introducing players to power continues. A joint investigation by OCCRP and the ABC found that Marape personally introduced Don Matheson the Australian consultant at the centre of the PNG Ports offshore-payments scandal to State Enterprises Minister William Duma in 2021, after which Duma forwarded Matheson's pitch for state-owned Port Moresby land to Kumul Consolidated Holdings. The same Duma was then tasked by Marape with leading the review of Matheson's affairs.

Even the family is not insulated from the pattern. In 2020, the Prime Minister's wife Rachael was publicly named in a land dispute outside Port Moresby, where a Motu Koitabu family alleged that a fence was erected over a 10-hectare site they had occupied for over a decade built at night, with police on site claiming they were "protecting" Mrs Marape's property. She denied land-grabbing and produced a state lease; the dispute crystallised public unease about how easily state machinery moves for those near the top.

Add the Dirio Gas and Power purchase agreement, the unexplained K20 million budget "typing error" that quietly shifted funds between provinces, the secrecy around recent design-finance-build road contracts, and the picture is consistent: a small interlocking network of relatives, friends, party financiers, and bureaucratic loyalists, moving money through state programmes while the formal oversight architecture is rebuilt around them.

This is what makes the Wereh appointment more than a personnel decision. It is the keystone in the wall. The contracts are written by friends. The payments are signed off by friends. The audits will now be conducted by friends. And the man placed at the centre of that final ring is the one who managed the cashflow when the alarms first started ringing.

PNG does not have a corruption problem in the abstract. It has a specific, named, addressable problem: a circle of perhaps two dozen people politicians, secretaries, contractors, in-laws, and old school mates who have learned that the state is a closed shop and that the keys are passed sideways, never surrendered. Wereh's return is not an outrage because he is uniquely dirty. It is an outrage because it confirms the rule. In Marape's PNG, accountability is not a check on power. It is a position. And like every other position worth having, it goes to a friend.

The revolving door has not just spun again. It has been bolted to the wall. The roads still aren't built. The medicines still aren't on the shelves. The schools still don't have desks. But the audit is in safe hands which, in this country, has always been the only thing that mattered.