No Financier, No Forum, No Excuse: The State Is Scrambling on a Project That Isn't Even Funded

by PAUL L. KEBAIJA

There is a strange spectacle unfolding in Port Moresby. The government has spent the year racing to convene a Development Forum, corral landowner identification, and clear the path for Papua LNG's final investment decision, for a project that does not yet have its financing in place. TotalEnergies' lead adviser, MUFG, is still hunting for a syndicate after twenty-nine banks and export credit agencies walked away. No financial close has been announced. The clock the State is sprinting against may not even be running.

Some will say this makes the social mapping mess academic: if there is no financier, the landowner question can wait. That reading is exactly backwards. The financing vacuum does not excuse the scramble. It exposes it.

Because here is the uncomfortable arithmetic. The Papua LNG Gas Agreement was signed in 2019. That is seven years the State has had to complete field-based social mapping and landowner identification across every licence area, clear the backlog before the Land Titles Commission, and build a benefit-distribution architecture ready to activate the moment a developer said go. Reach further back and the arithmetic gets worse. PNG LNG's first gas flowed in 2014, twelve years ago, and its lessons were written in the plainest possible language: landowner identification left incomplete before production, royalties frozen in trust for years because the State could not lawfully say who its own citizens-beneficiaries were, clan vetting dragged out until grievance curdled into violence in Hela. Every review, every conference paper, every commission of inquiry since has said the same thing. Do the identification first. Do it in the field. Do it before the licence, not after the ribbon-cutting.

Yet this month, at the government's own industry showcase, an expert consultant stood up and explained that disputes persist because SMLI quality depends on who was hired, when they were deployed, and whether the work was done at community level rather than as a desktop exercise, and openly questioned whether such studies should precede development licensing at all. In 2026. Two decades into the LNG era. That is not a knowledge gap. That is an institutionalisation failure. The lessons were learnt; they were simply never converted into systems, no statutory requirement for completed, verified, published SMLI before licensing, no permanently resourced identification machinery, no dispute-resolution capacity scaled to the caseload.

And the same failure shows up on the money side. The State has known since 2019 that it must finance a 22.5 per cent stake in a multibillion-dollar project. Where is the published financing plan? Kumul Petroleum's own chairman concedes there is "no windfall cash" even with PNG LNG's debt retired. With the Australian banks and the Asian Development Bank refusing the project, PNG's borrowing options narrow toward lenders whose terms will come with strings and that conversation, too, is happening in a rush, in the dark, at the eleventh hour.

This is the pattern worth naming: the State treats every megaproject as a one-off emergency rather than building permanent capability between them. Readiness is sovereignty. A government that arrives at the negotiating table with completed landowner registers, a functioning titles tribunal, and a costed equity plan can dictate terms and absorb delay. A government that improvises all three against a developer's timetable will sign whatever is put in front of it whenever the money finally arrives, from whoever finally offers it.

TotalEnergies' financing troubles have gifted Papua New Guinea something it rarely gets: time. The question is whether the government uses it to build the systems it has owed its people since Hela or simply waits, and scrambles again.