By JOE GURINA
Prime Minister James Marape has been urged by the opposition to publish acquittals of the COVID-19 operations.
Opposition leader Belden Namah made this clarification known after detecting the government’s failure in mishandling the emergency right from the start and was operating in secrecy, hiding behind the COVID-19 Pandemic Act.
“The Prime Minister must now publish full details of the COVID-19 operation. It must publish acquittals (accounts and details) and account for the first K24 million, the K600 million rollout, the K1.2 billion soft loan from Australia and all the subsequent gifts, grants and loans,’’ Namah said.
“Otherwise, we can rightly and with justification accuse the Prime Minister and his foreign advisors of funding spikes in Coronavirus infections as a gimmick to attract and spend funds dubiously and on expenditure unrelated to the health pandemic.
“We just need to remind ourselves of Mr Marape’s WhatsApp message not too long ago to his Pangu Pati members that he would do whatever it takes to return them to power in 2022,’’ Namah said.
He said in the absence of any reporting and any future plans or strategies, “we can only conclude that the Prime Minister and his team are applying their election 2022 strategy.’’
He said the government should put in place plans and strategies if they were serious in addressing the issue.
‘’By now we should have an immediate plan and strategy hence we are already one year into the pandemic,’’ he said.
He said such strategies and plans were to be set beside broader national health plans so resources were distributed fairly to combat older diseases such as malaria, pneumonia, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and cancer among others.
He said the people need to be told how effective the Astra Zeneca vaccine is and how effective it is to fight the virus in the body and how often one needs to be vaccinated or is it once in a life time shot such as polio.