by PAUL L. KEBAIJA
When James Marape became Prime Minister in 2019 he publicly cursed corruption and those who practise it. He swore he would not be bought or sold. Seven years later, on Repentance Day 2025, he withdrew that curse, claiming it was never meant for the nation and asking forgiveness as part of a national reset. The symbolic gesture changes nothing on the ground. The frost now blanketing Highland paths tells the real story. White, dead ground where gardens once grew. A lone figure walking into the cold. Lower down, green crops still cling to rocky soil against mountain backdrops at sunset. The contrast is not poetic. It is the visible beginning of another El Niño disaster that Marape’s leadership was warned about and still failed to prepare for.
The photographs taken on a Galaxy A06 camera cut through the spin. Frost lies thick and white across Highland paths, turning familiar ground into an alien, frozen corridor under fading light. A solitary figure in a bright jacket walks away into the cold. Lower down, green crops still push through stony soil in neat rows, backed by mist-shrouded mountains and thatched huts at sunset. The contrast is brutal: life clinging on in one frame, death creeping in from above in the next. These are not abstract warnings. This is the land already speaking.
El Niño has returned with documented force. NOAA and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology confirmed in mid-June 2026 that a strong event is active, carrying the risk of ranking among the most intense in modern records. For the Highlands the pattern is brutally familiar. Frost at altitude and erratic rainfall below destroy sweet potato gardens the single most important food source for millions. In 2015–2016 the same phenomenon left more than a million Highlanders in food crisis. In 1997 remote communities saw death rates rise. The science and the history are clear. The question is whether this government will act before the same cycle repeats.
Prime Minister James Marape now carries this as his second major problem. The first has been the grinding accumulation of governance failures: resource deals that enrich connected insiders while basic services rot, persistent corruption allegations, and a visible inability to contain the social and security fallout from the Pacific drug highway spilling into PNG communities. El Niño does not arrive in a vacuum. It lands on top of already weakened rural systems, underfunded health posts, and subsistence families with no financial buffer.
Effective leadership would have moved months ago. Early disaster declarations, pre-positioned rice and seed stocks in Enga, Simbu, Jiwaka and Western Highlands, distribution of frost-tolerant varieties, and honest public messaging about what is coming. Instead the familiar performance is underway: downplaying the scale, waiting for the worst pictures before acting, and preparing the usual excuses about “global climate” while local preparedness remains thin on the ground. Past El Niño responses were slow, politicised and, in places, marred by allegations of diversion. The Highlands remote, cash-poor, and politically marginal always pay first and longest.
Marape’s well-worn lies and bullshit will not fill empty gardens or stop children going hungry. Grand speeches about economic transformation through LNG and other projects have not built resilient food systems. Anti-corruption rhetoric has not produced transparent relief mechanisms. Blame-shifting will not restore the white-frosted paths to productive ground. The people who live in the landscapes shown in these photographs cannot eat press releases or wait for the next round of elite deal-making to trickle down.
This second crisis will reveal whether anything has truly changed under the current leadership. If the response is more of the same delay, spin, selective aid, and elite self-protection then the Highlands will once again carry the heaviest burden while the rest of the country watches another predictable disaster unfold. The land has already shown its warning. The only question left is whether Marape’s government will finally listen before the next frost claims its victims.
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