Monday, 27 April 2026
Today, a five-man Supreme Court bench reserved its decision on the question of standing in the Opposition’s constitutional challenge for a VONC. The Court’s ruling with full confidence in the judiciary and the rule of law will be made soon.
While Papua New Guinea burns, the Prime Minister Marape issues self-congratulatory birthday tributes and speaks of democratic virtue, taking snaps with NRL players and watching rugby games. The actions of the Prime Minister are callous, and his self-glorification as some “chosen” son of Papua New Guinea is delusional.
The facts are these: PNG has been greylisted by the Financial Action Task Force, a direct consequence of governance failures that have scared away legitimate foreign investment. The kina continues its prolonged devaluation, eroding the purchasing power of every Papua New Guinean family. The cost-of-living crisis is punishing families. National debt has surpassed K66 billion fueled by insatiable consumption, not used for investments, job creation, or an agricultural revolution. Now, interest repayments alone crowd-out spending on essential services and cancel out public investments. Weak leadership has allowed selective warranting, political patronage, and corruption to proliferate and become the norm, thus, crippling budget execution and leaving hospitals without medicine, schools without teachers, public institutions politicized and weak, and infrastructure in disarray.
And what has been the Government’s response? Not reform. Not accountability. Not leadership. Instead, this Government has weaponised legislation and exploited its numerical parliamentary majority to entrench itself against democratic contest and parliamentary accountability. The very motion before the Supreme Court arose because the Government manipulated the constitutional process to deny the Opposition its lawful right to test confidence in the Prime Minister in Parliament. That is not democracy, it is the abuse of power so the government can do the wrong things with impunity.
Prime Minister Marape speaks of humility. He speaks of Tari, of his mother’s struggles, of God and gratitude. But humility is not a press release. Humility is taking ownership of failure. Under his seven years of leadership, the country has not advanced — it has regressed. The Marape Government has had the time, the mandate, the resources, and the parliamentary numbers. It has had every opportunity. The evidence of its stewardship is visible: grey listing, devaluation, unemployment, health crisis, education crisis, law and order crisis, and historic budgets with no tangible outcomes.
The Opposition’s message to the Prime Minister is clear: stop celebrating. Start accounting for the K156 expenditure in seven historic budgets and the K66 billion debt burden you have forced upon the country. The people of Papua New Guinea are not an audience for your legacy-building. They are citizens who deserve results, not tokenism and the litany of broken promises synonymous with your government.
If the Prime Minister possesses the integrity he so publicly professes, he should do what no amount of birthday tributes can substitute for — acknowledge the scale of this leadership failure and resign as Prime Minister. Papua New Guinea cannot afford another year of managed decline and pretense presented as progress.