Who marks the nation’s homework?

Every five years, Papua New Guineans queue at polling booths to judge their leaders. In between elections, that judgment goes quiet. Governments release budgets, ministers make speeches, donors publish glossy progress reports, and citizens are left to take most of it on faith. There is a sharper benchmark sitting unused in plain sight: the Constitution itself, and specifically the Five National Goals and Directive Principles that open it. Citizens could use them to write their own report card on the nation, on their own timetable, answerable to no one but themselves.

This is not a new idea so much as a neglected one. The Constitutional Planning Committee spent nearly two years in the early 1970s taking submissions in village council houses and school halls before it drafted the Goals. Its intention was a compass the whole country could read, not a legal instrument reserved for judges and public servants. Somewhere in the fifty years since, that compass has stayed mostly closed. Ask a market vendor, a cocoa farmer or a university student to name the Five Goals and the likely response is a shrug, not because the Goals are irrelevant, but because nobody outside government and the courts has much occasion to consult them.

A citizen report card would change that occasion into a habit. The mechanism is unglamorous: take a document the government cannot disown, because it wrote it, and use it as the measuring stick for the government’s own performance rather than the measuring stick governments prefer, which is usually a list of their own achievements.

It does not need to be complicated. Each of the Five Goals, integral human development, equality and participation, national sovereignty and self-reliance, sound management of natural resources, and reliance on Papua New Guinean ways, breaks down into plain questions that a church group, a student union or a provincial forum could ask for itself. Has this year’s budget narrowed the gap between provinces or widened it? Are resource projects leaving jobs and royalties behind, or just holes in the ground? Is decision-making moving toward communities, or further into Waigani? None of these questions require a law degree. They require attention, a little data, and the discipline to write the answers down and compare them year on year.

That discipline is where the real power sits, more than in any single score. A one-off complaint is noise a government can absorb. A dated, repeatable assessment, this year against last year, one province against another, creates a record a government has to actively ignore, and ignoring a published scorecard for long enough starts to look like something is being hidden. That reputational cost is a form of accountability that doesn’t require a single new law.

Tying the exercise to the Constitution rather than to political promises is a deliberate choice. Manifestos shift with the electoral cycle; the National Goals do not, short of a formal amendment that would itself draw scrutiny. Constitutional language also forces a more serious conversation than slogans allow, not least because the Goals came bundled with Basic Social Obligations, the citizen’s own side of the bargain, including duties to protect the environment, respect others’ rights and contribute to community life. A credible report card looks in both directions, at what government owes citizens and what citizens owe each other. That symmetry is part of what would make it stick rather than simply read as another grievance list.

None of this needs new institutions, and it certainly cannot wait on funding from a government being asked to mark its own work. A church group with a mimeograph machine could have started this in 1976. A Facebook group or a university civics class could start it this year. What it needs is a shift in habit: treating the Constitution as a working civic tool, consulted annually, rather than a document wheeled out for graduation speeches and independence anniversaries.

The framers were explicit that a nation had to know where it wanted to go before it could choose how to get there, and that the direction belonged to “we leaders and people” together, not to leaders alone. Parliament and the courts test the leaders’ side of that bargain most years. The people’s side, actually reading the compass and checking the country’s course against it, has barely been tried. A report card, however modest, is where that could start.

Originally published https://aunamelo.wordpress.com/2026/09/14/who-marks-the-nations-homework/