THE SURGEON, SUPPLY CHAIN AND LOVER AKA COMPANY SECRETARY

by PAUL L. KEBAIJA

In April, Papua New Guinea's Prime Minister took a ministry off Dr Billy Joseph because he did not trust him with it. In July, he gave him a bigger one.

Nothing changed in between. No report was published. No finding was made. No clearance was announced. Marape had promised an inquiry that would leave no stone unturned, establish the full facts, determine accountability, and identify any offences committed at every level of the process. Four months later the stones are where he left them, and the man they were meant to be turned over remains untouched by anything resembling a conclusion.

Recall what triggered it. Marape assumed the defence portfolio while an independent probe into PNGDF recruitment irregularities proceeded, saying preliminary reports pointed to possible vested interests interfering in recruitment, including favouritism and improper influence after video circulated suggesting Joseph favoured people from his own district of Nipa-Kutubu, and after Opposition MPs claimed he had effectively been using soldiers as personal security. Deputy Opposition Leader Keith Iduhu had said the interference allegations were raised in Parliament earlier that year and were never properly addressed.

That is a Prime Minister stripping a minister of a national security portfolio over the integrity of the armed forces. It is the most serious thing that can be done to a minister short of dismissal. And the state's response was to let it lapse into silence and then reward the man at the centre of it. In the July reshuffle, Joseph took the Health Ministry and kept National Disaster.

Consider what that portfolio touches. Health regulates private medical providers. It sets the terms on which they contract to the state. It controls the pipeline through which every drug, reagent and diagnostic in the country moves. And Joseph arrives at it as a former surgeon whose name is publicly attached to Sky Health & Medical Services a nationally owned private medical provider built around the extractive industry, which has publicly courted work with ExxonMobil and TotalEnergies on Papua LNG and PNG LNG, and which opened an 8-Mile headquarters clinic in Port Moresby marketed as the only private lab in PNG running high-end PCR and automated extraction systems, with capacity of 5,000 samples a day. The only private lab of its kind in the country. Now regulated by a minister connected to it.

Then there is the announcement. Joseph has directed the establishment of an independent procurement authority to end medical stock-outs. Stock-outs are real and they kill people, and the case for reform is not the issue. The issue is that a minister with a commercial history in private medical supply is designing the vehicle through which the state will buy medical supplies, and nobody has published his interests.

Not a verbal assurance. Not a declaration lodged and unread. The register, itemised and public: shareholdings, directorships, trusts, associated entities, dates of acquisition and disposal. Until that exists, every contract that authority signs will be contestable, and the first supplier who loses a tender will say so in court.

At district level his own people have gone further. The community of Pulim Ward 3, in the Aron Tribe of Nipa Basin LLG, has publicly alleged that he misrepresented Defence recruitment on the floor of Parliament, that Igam Barracks land was transferred to a company he controls, that illegal council wards were created and their common rolls inflated while the original Nipa-Kutubu wards were cut, and that DDA CEO and DFM appointments went overwhelmingly to men from his Sowa village.

These are constituent allegations, not findings, and this masthead does not treat them as proved. But they are not unfalsifiable rumour either. Each one sits against a document that already exists somewhere in the state: a State Lease title search for the Igam parcel; the Electoral Commission's ward gazettals and roll figures for Nipa-Kutubu, before and after; the DDA board minutes recording those appointments. Any of them can be produced in an afternoon by anyone with the will to ask.

And while those questions sit unanswered, Joseph is asking the Southern Highlands Provincial Assembly to split the very electorate whose boundaries and rolls his constituents say he has already manipulated a proposal that, if it succeeds, redraws the map before anyone has checked the old one.

He is entitled to the presumption of innocence. He is not entitled to inherit the health system while the investigation his own Prime Minister ordered stays in a drawer.
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