On the 28th of July the National Fisheries Authority officially announced the appointment of its new Managing Director, Justin Ilakini.
Ilakini is long time expert in both the Papua New Guinea and Regional fisheries industry. Originally from Gavuone Village, Central Province, he served with the NFA for 8 years before taking up advisory roles at the Honiara, Solomon Islands based Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA). He served the FFA for over 9 years, working with pacific FFA member governments and tuna industry players assisting with regional economic integration and investment facilitation.
He returned to the NFA in 2019 and has now been appointed to the Managing Director position. Mr Ilakini brings with him to NFA, the strong motivation to drive an agenda of change.
This change will be centered on two main components - Organizational and Fisheries Sector Reforms.
The key purpose of these reforms is on ensuring the NFA as an organization, is best placed to continue to maximize the impact in maintaining the key pillars for growth as outlined in the Fisheries Strategic Plan 2021-2030. These key pillars are:
- Resource Sustainability
- Maximizing Socio-economic Benefits
- Maximizing Revenue
Ilakini states, “At the NFA our key mandated function is to protect and sustainably manage our resource and to ensure it is secured for our children for generations to come, but at the same time we also have a challenge to generate and raise revenue.”
“Those functions at times can have conflicting policy objectives with each other, so through the wisdom of the National Fisheries Board, and under my leadership we will endeavour to ensure government policy directives are effectively implemented through appropriate structural changes.”
Outlined in Ilakini’s initial 90-day plan are key focus areas that aim to kick-start key elements of organisational strengthening, in conjunction with expanding the NFA’s reach into the commercial space, a key agenda backed and strongly supported by the Government.
Ilakini states “We have established a commercial entity that is 100% owned by the NFA.
“This commercial entity, namely Fisheries Capital Limited will be the engine room for maximizing revenue, enabling key infrastructure to help expand our fisheries industry, grow downstream processing, increase local participation and be solely responsible for capitalizing the sector with PNG interests at its heart. This can also be seen as our strategy to capitalize on our major source of revenue, the vessel days scheme (VDS), wherein we will look at creating more value from our tuna resources, instead of just rent seeking.”
The overarching direction of these initiatives is to ‘Transform Papua New Guinea into a major commercial fisheries hub in Asia Pacific’. This includes taking on board digital transformation initiatives to improve service delivery and better position the NFA to be digitally agile in the globally shifting face of digital business and e-commerce.