BY KUMBIT AIVI

ALONG WITH 16 September 1975, 8 December 2009 has gone down as a significant date in the short modern history of our country.

The months leading up to December 2009 were some of the most exciting times I’ve had in my life. After a long and frustrating wait and a number of false starts along the way, the PNG liquefied natural gas project was finally coming to fruition.

The excitement brought optimism to Papua New Guineans that the economic gods had finally heard our cries. Well not exactly.

Had the demon not emerged from the abyss and tempted us to steal and plunder from us over the last three decades, we probably wouldn’t have been that much excited. But that’s another matter.

As it is now, our LNG project presents us the best possible hope of turning things around for the better.

But our excitement must be grounded in reality. An independent study of the economic impacts of this project by Acil Tasman has contributed considerably in setting us on the right footing.

As well as modelling the vast positive impacts of this project on government finances, the report cautions us to be wary of economic shocks that could lead us to destruction if appropriate actions are not taken to address downside risks.

The phenomenon of Dutch Disease, or the so called ‘resource curse’, has been central to the sounding of warning bells and has fortunately been recognised as an important issue that needs addressing as part of our strategy in capitalising fully from the project.

Discussions on this last year led to our leaders calling for the establishment of a sovereign fund to cushion possible shocks to our economy. While agreeing that there are compelling economic arguments for such a fund, I think it should also be considered in light of some age-old cultural practices and the conflicting understanding of the notion of wealth in the distinct cultural settings we find ourselves in.

As a keen follower of our development agenda, I conclude that some of the reasons for our lack of progress lie in the differences in understanding wealth in our adopted western culture against the backdrop of our traditional Melanesian culture.

Since the idea of a sovereign fund is essentially about the protection of wealth in the modern western sense, we need to understand how wealth is defined and protected in our own cultural setting so as to enhance our chances of effectively accumulating, protecting and deploying it for the optimum benefit of our people.

To do this, we need to go back to our roots and seek answers to the question of where our values lie; for the notion of wealth is inherently linked to our values.

What is it that a typical traditional Papua New Guinean society values the most? Any Papua New Guinean, or Melanesian for that matter, will tell you without even thinking that it is land.

Like westerners, we have a keen understanding of how land gives rise to wealth. Land, therefore, is the most priced possession in our society.

Beyond land sit our traditional symbols of wealth such as pigs and gardens. And they are followed closely by kinship - our social security. We can analyse each factor that gives rise to traditional value systems and cash is never one of them.

Cash was never an element of traditional value systems and most Papua New Guineans view it in a very different light than people from other cultures, particularly westerners.

The individualistic western view of cash is as an important commodity that can determine the level of one’s happiness and security. But a more communalist Papua New Guinean does not necessarily see it that way. We see cash as an interesting here-today-gone-tomorrow craze that can buy us some of the things some of the time but not all things all the time.

Stories abound in PNG about serious and sometimes fatal confrontations among people on matters such as land, pigs, gardens, tribal relations and so on. Without trying to advocate the acceptance of some of the barbaric acts that arise out of trying to defend wealth as we understand it, I would like to point out that most such actions are a strong indication of where our value systems lie.

People are willing to put their lives on the line for what they truly value and hold near and dear to them.

Likewise, we hear about seemingly massive compensation claims by people for whatever it may be and think them unreasonable. But are they really unreasonable? How do you put a monetary value on a garden patch, for instance, when there are such extremely different value propositions in the minds of a typical Papua New Guinean who thinks food, survival and security and a typical westerner who thinks cash?

In the same vein, how do you get a typical Papua New Guinean to think about cash in the same way he does land, pigs, gardens and rivers? The difficulty with getting a savings culture going among our people in the cash economy today can reasonably be traced to an absence of such a culture in our traditional settings.

We need not save anything in our villages because of a strong presence of our social security found in our kinship. We give in our good days and take in our bad days. Ours has been a beautiful give-and-take culture, essentially a barter economy.

So why is it important to understand our own traditional value systems and our notion of wealth? Because it explains, to some extent, our failure over the years in enforcing our accountability mechanisms that are supposed to protect and promote the modern cash economy.

Until very recently, cash had never been part of our value system and so no one saw it important enough to go to the trouble of protecting it from abuse and misuse.

To this day, cash as a measure of wealth is an abstract subject that is poorly understood by the majority of our people who live mostly off their land and natural environments during much of the year in rural settings.

Therefore, unless we get a sizeable number of Papua New Guineans to value and appreciate cash as a source of wealth, we will continue to struggle to effectively hold those who control our national purse accountable.

And unless our law enforcing agencies start applying our laws without fear or favour, I predict that the wastage and pilferage of our collective cash wealth will continue unabated for some time yet. For cultural reasons, we are handicapped in invoking people power to cause things to be done properly to guard our cash economy.

Such a scenario only adds more weight to the case for the set up of a sovereign fund to lock away our excess cash earnings until such time when Papua New Guineans appreciate its value and begin to fully embrace it as wealth.

This should inevitably lead to better scrutiny of how our cash economy is managed for optimum national gains. Until this happens, we are better off keeping any surplus cash at a safe distance from corrupt and unscrupulous hands.

Kumbit Aivi is the pseudonym of a Papua New Guinean financial services executive working in Port Moresby