Social inconvenience compensation was unknown in Panguna Mine

Leonard Fong Roka

There is truth that BCL was not observant to local values in dealing with the landowners of Panguna before the crisis as there is also emerging truth that the landowner leaders of the pre-1989 period were exploitive to the illiterate landowners they were suppose to protect and defend their rights.

To the many young leaders helping in positions in the 9 landowner groups related to the Panguna mine but were just ordinary students in primary and high schools before the crisis, they are now learning a lot of things that their poor illiterate parents never knew thus were denied for what was rightfully theirs.

To the many young leaders BCL was committed in delivering whatever compensation that it was required to pay under the then exploitative legal structures like the Bougainville Copper Agreement (BCA) of 1967. But it seems evident that the local leaders were more than cruel to build their own financial status.

This has been the case for two young leaders now in charge of the Panguna’s Upper Tailings Office administration in Arawa. The pair Camillus Kabui and Francis Nazia were surprised in learning from BCL that there was a compensation package referred to as ‘social inconvenience’ that the company paid to their people for the noise, dust and so on created by mining activities like plants on the roads 24/7 but their parents or relatives back home never knew this existed.

“Our people in all the Panguna mine affected areas had no idea of this social inconvenience compensation,” they told me in their office. “All that money under social inconvenience was stolen from our elders by the few educated elites inside the old Panguna Landowners Association that the late Francis Ona rebelled against.

“Those few stole the money and benefited with their families whilst we suffered with the noise and dust storms the BCL plants made along our roads and homes.”

Most people in the Upper Tailings zone only knew about the Special mining, the tailings and the PMAR (port-mine-access-road) that involved bush, occupation and physical disturbances compensation packets.

But the people are today learning from the new leaders about the social inconvenience compensation that BCL paid that covered the disturbances from BCL plants and so on and this covered the Guava access road, the Panguna-Jaba road, a tailings trust fund and many others sections within the mining areas.

On the compensation package note released by BCL in Buka in December 3-5 2013 to the landowners, it showed that from the annual compounding of base amount of March 1990 figure that is K1 375 966.85, the BCL owes the landowners—calculated using the annual treasury bills—some K13 913 177.36 for the various compensation packets.

Out of this, social inconvenience stands at K4 035 111. 42 and the people that the pre-crisis landowner leaders had denied them are happy that they have something in this category at last.

In this packet, it is obvious that only the Lower Tailings association in the Bana District of South Bougainville will not have the social inconvenience compensation led by James Tauriko since they took their share in the 1990s and invested it in other business activities in Lae, Morobe Province in PNG and back home where they now have cocoa plantations.

BCL was prepared to pay this amount but the current landowner leaders delayed it because they want two other financial institutions provide other calculations beside this so they can compare and receive a better price.