Special Agriculture & Business Lease
On July 21, 2011 the then Acting Prime Minister Sam Abal announced the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry to investigate 77 land leases which were issued under the Somare government’s Special Agriculture & Business Leases (SABL).
The inquiry, which was later extended by Prime Minister Peter O’Neill in October 2011 for a further five months, discovered that over 90 percent of the leases totalling over 5 million hectares were illegally obtained from traditional landowners (Zealand, 2015).
The inquiry recommended that the leases be cancelled and the land returned to the landowners. But to date the National Government is yet to make progress on this policy decision. In September 2016 National Research Institute (NRI) director Dr. Charles Yala described the SABL as a system that promoted land grabbing (Mou, 2016).
In March 2017 the Lands and Physical Planning Minister Benny Allen was criticized in an NRI blog, which accused him of releasing misleading statements on the findings and recommendations of the commission of inquiry (Yapumi, 2017).
In March 2017 Mr O’Neill confirmed that all SABL licenses were cancelled in a 2014 National Executive Council (NEC) decision, and asked the querying journalist to check with the Department of Lands and Physical Planning, to ascertain why investors still had their licenses (Orere, 2017).
In April 2017 Mr Allen announced in a ministerial statement that the National Government has revoked all SABL titles and will now work with customary landowners to transfer them under a new voluntary customary land registration system (Patjole, 2017).
Two years after the NEC decided to revoke and cancel all SABL licenses in 2014 there is still no progress on this particular issue. There also appears to be a disconnect between the Office of the PM and the minister, in the face of public concern and criticism.
If the PM had publicly assured the public of the cancellation of all SABL licenses then it is time to deal with the cabinet minister who continues to defy prime ministerial directives.
