Copyright postcourier
The 2024 National Census results are out. We are told we have a population of 10.2 million people. The last national census was in 2011 and that one put our population at over seven million people. We have to assume that our population had grown by over three million people in the last 13 years. There are many, including Paul Barker from the Institute of National Affairs, who are questioning the integrity of the results. We are not surprised, there are pockets of people in communities around Port Moresby that were not counted and PNG is a big country, with a diverse geographical make up, which has always proven to be a barrier in the conduct of any national event. Another effort to collect our population data is a huge embarrassment. This is the National Identification Project, or NID as it is called. Prime Minister James Marape informed us that by September 16, 2025, everyone in the country will be registered and he provided K60 million – another huge sum for a project that has consumed millions of Kina already. In fact, since 2015, after spending half-a billion Kina, we only managed to register 3, 819, 045 persons. Of this, only 1, 390, 468 cards were printed. We are not sure how many have been issued because NID office has boxes of cards with errors collecting dust. At the same time, the never-ending reports about the bribes offered to NID officials to get them to fast track applications, pose a serious threat to the project integrity and the reputation of the people and the state agency involved in the project. We demand an investigation and audit into all aspects of NID: it’s management, office and business processes, staff capacity, equipment and technologies adopted as well as the funding that was provided for this project from the beginning. It is clear the NID has serious leadership and management issues that need to be acknowledged and addressed properly. Everything seems to have crumbled in the past several years. How can that be explained when we live in a high developed technological world today. While we are battling to upgrade our population data, the government is intending to have biometric or electronic voting in the coming elections. If this is ever going to happen, we need competent leadership and a complete overhaul of the current business processes and technology that is going nowhere.
