Waiting for Godot in the land of opportunity costs
“I haven’t heard from you lately,” a friend of mine remarked recently.
My friend wanted to know why I wasn’t writing a lot of blogs.
Part of the reason I haven’t been blogging much is that I’ve got a lot on my plate lately. The other reason is that there are many voices online such that I keep wondering who is listening if everyone is talking.
But perhaps the main reason is that I keep doubting whether my opinion provides clarity to the national discourse or adds to the confusion. I wonder if in my mind’s eye, I do see the fundamentals of the issues being debated. Or am I, as Plato observed, merely in a cave watching the shadows on the wall and drawing conclusions on what is happening outside.
The 2017 elections have been a sobering experience for me personally. I have come to the conclusion that the electors deserve to be screwed by the elected. Papua New Guinea’s so called silent majority deserve to remain silent because they have stuffed their mouths and bellies during election time and voted against their own long term interest.
Such voter behaviour is hardly surprising. Rather than being passive victims, in many other fiascoes such as land-grabbing, illegal logging and destructive mining, Papua New Guineans (both the elite and grassroots) have actively participated in shaping the negative outcomes.
“I must tell you the truth that we were looking for cash. This is why, without considering all these implications, we opted to bring in the developer” a regretful Pomio landowner leader, John Parulria tells Al Jazeera’s Andrew Thomas.
In some of the workshops I have run in resource provinces, I have shown a film by SBS Australia which highlights how Papua New Guineans cut themselves a raw deal in the PNG LNG project.
Indeed, as PNG’s recently released Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) reports for 2015 and 2016 show, the LNG Project paid very little in corporate income taxes to the government. According to the 2016 EITI Report 7,944,946 tonnes of LNG worth K 8, 013, 000,000 (K 8 billion) were exported.
Of the K 8 Billion in gas exported, Exxon Mobil only paid K 3, 208, 867 (K 3.2 million) in corporate income tax.
The World Bank’s Papua New Guinea Economic Update describes the PNG LNG revenue situation as “Waiting for Godot”. This is a rather ominous description as the Samuel Beckett play Waiting for Godot describes a situation where two of the characters wait for someone called Godot who never arrives.
Is the World Bank warning two of the characters in the PNG LNG tragedy i.e. the Government and People of PNG, that the expected windfalls from gas exports will never come? Yes indeed. The World Bank’s Papua New Guinea Economic Update refers to a “complex web of exemptions and allowances that effectively mean that little revenue is received by government and landowners, either through taxes, royalties or development levies.”
As I’ve reflected on the myriad of challenges facing my country, one common denominator arises and that is our tendency to make bad decisions. Much of the decision making seems to be based on emotion, intuition, magical thinking, etc… rather than reason or being evidence based.
There is also a tendency not to take responsibility for the bad decisions we make. It’s always someone else’s fault.
When we as individuals, as a society or as a nation make decisions, there is a cost which economists refer to as the opportunity cost. The opportunity cost is the loss of alternatives that results from the choices we have made.
Unless we make sound decisions at the personal and societal level, we shall continue to be waiting for Gadot in the land of opportunity costs.
