Four days ago, Port Moresby residents witnessed the looting and burning down of shopping centres and private property of businesses houses. Many of these businesses, established long before Papua New Guinea gained sovereignty.
On Friday, January 12, main shopping centres in the city opened their doors to shoppers. One such step, needed to encourage the restoration of normalcy to scared residents and citizens alike.
CPL Group opened up doors to Stop & Shop Waigani Central, Town, Boroko and Airways along with City Pharmacy Waigani Drive, Boroko and Vision City, despite suffering major losses in Wednesday’s riots.
Other shopping centres alike, took heart and opened up for business, to serve not only their customers, in doing, encouraging the restoration of normalcy to scared residents and citizens alike.
On commencing operations, CPL Group has been making efforts to secure their staff, ensure staff know that they are all still on payroll and gather information on how much and what they have truly lost.
CPL’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Navin Raju on CPL commencing operations says: “This was unplanned for, we didn’t expect this kind of turnout. We’ve got a lot of experience in dealing with large crowd of customers. We’ve done that in the past with Christmas but doing that in the middle of January was something that we haven’t planned for.
Mr Raju further added, “So far, we have been dealing with the crowds quite nicely and there are enough supplies here for everyone.”
On Friday the shopping centre was buzzling with activity filled with many eager shoppers.
One shopper, Vanua Kana who resides at Tuna Bay, Taurama stated that she didn’t feel comfortable moving around the city after the riots on Wednesday but needed to shop for food supplies for her family.
“Thank you so much for CPL for opening up for making this time for me to come and shop and also stock up food for my family.”
Furthermore, CEO Raju says they are overwhelmed with public support during this difficult time and appreciate the community’s kind messages of sympathy and solidarity towards their team.
“On behalf of CPL Group I’d like to thank everyone. We are overwhelmed with the support that we are getting from the people and I would really like to thank everyone.
He further emphasized that CPL Group does not endorse any fundraising on their behalf stating, “We do not endorse any kind of funding or GoFundMe page or anything that people are requesting us and they been offering to us. We don’t want any of those funding to go ahead. All we want is your support through our shops and we’ll get through this together.”
The Group has also made several calls warning Port Moresby residents to not buy stolen pharmaceutical and medical products like baby formula and prescription medicines as it may be damaged, tampered with or cold chain breach and wrong doses me be administered.