By Dr Eric Kwa
My apologies for this late reply to this post. The Department of Justice and Attorney General (DJAG) has oversight over the Village Court Magistrates and Land Mediators. There are currently 19,000 Village Court officials and Land Mediators covering 1870 Village Court areas in the country.
The Village Court officials and land mediators were first put on Govt ALESCO Payroll around 2015 after approval by the NEC. The total cost of Village Court and Land Mediators allowances is K80 million per annum. Since 2016, the Govt was paying K50 million annually. This meant that DJAG couldn’t pay about 700 Village Court allowances since 2016. DJAG did get approval from the NEC to increase the allowance to K80 million in 2019, but unfortunately the Govt has been unable to pay the full amount.
My office has been working hard to secure the full K80 million but to date we could only secure an additional K15 million. Thus currently we are paying about K65 million to the Village Court officials and Land Mediators. We have tried to reduce the number of Village Court officals without allowances down from 7000, and we are slowly getting there.
My heart aches for our Village Court officials and Land Mediators who are still not on any allowances. This is where we have reached out to several Provincial Govts to support the Nat Govt pay the allowances for the balance of the officials in the provinces.
On this note please note that the new Law and Justice Policy 2025-2035 now focuses more attention to our Village Courts and Land Mediation. We also have the Village Court Policy 2020 and the Village Court Revitalisation Strategy 2020-2030. Two key elements of the new Village Court Policy is the appointment of Village Court Clerks and Peace Officers at Grade 12 level. Under the policy DJAG will send these new officials for a Certificate Course at SILAG for 3 months. After 2 years, DJAG will fund these officials to undertake a Diploma in Justice Administration at DWU (all arrangements are already in place). These officials can then leave the Village Court system and find jobs elsewhere if they wish. The aim is to give the Grade 12 graduates who cannot get into tertiary education a second chance. I encourage you all to encourage your young Grade 12 graduates who are doing nothing to join the Village Courts system to find a path forward in their lives.
The second critical policy decision is to build Permanent Village Court houses to give recognition to the work of the Village Court. This has already been rolled out. For Morobe we have built 2 permanent Village Court houses already (Wampar and Markham) which I opened last year. We are building a 3rd one at Aihi LLG near Malahang.
We plan to continue to build more Village Court houses in Morobe and PNG.
If any of you require any further information on this please do not hesitate to WhatsApp me directly.
Sampela toktok tasol. God bless.
