By Miles Lacey
Samoa is a small South Pacific country made up of two major islands – Upolu and Savai’i – and a few minor ones. It has a total area of 2347 square kilometres. That is half the size of the Auckland region. The population of Samoa is approximately 202,000 people with about 37,000 of them living in Samoa’s capital Apia. Its Gross Domestic Product per capita is $USD4324.
To understand the constitutional crisis it’s important to understand some Samoan history and its political system.
Under the terms of the Treaty of Washington in 1899, the Samoan islands were partitioned between Germany and the United States. The German part of Samoa had been under nominal German control since 1889 but there had been conflicts with the Americans and British over the control of these islands.
With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 New Zealand soldiers invaded and occupied German Samoa. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 German Samoa became a New Zealand mandate. In effect, it became a New Zealand colony.
New Zealand rule was marked by incompetence and misrule. During the Spanish influenza pandemic, New Zealand authorities allowed a ship with infected people to berth in Apia. As a result around 90% of the Samoan population became infected, 22% of the male population died and 10% of the female population died. Before the pandemic, the Samoan population was about 39,500 people. Not surprisingly, this led to the growth of the Mau movement which embarked upon a series of peaceful protests. During a protest in Apia on December 29th, 1929, New Zealand police fired into the crowd with a machine gun. In the process, they killed Samoa’s paramount chief and ten other protesters. The day became known as Black Saturday.
The Mau movement and other groups pursued a non-violent campaign to achieve independence. On January 1st, 1962, Samoa became the first Pacific island nation (after New Zealand) to become independent. In August 1970 it joined the Commonwealth of Nations and, in 1976, Samoa was admitted to the United Nations. Western Samoa (as it was called until 1997) supported the United States and its allies during the Cold War.
Samoa’s political system is described as a very hard Parliamentary democracy. When Samoa became independent one of the paramount chiefs – Fiame Nata’afa Faumuina Mulina’u II – became the Prime Minister and Tupu’a Tamasese Mea’ole and Malietoa Tanumafili II became Samoa’s Heads of State for life. The former lived until 1964 while the latter lived until 2007. Since then the Samoan Parliament (the Fono) has elected the Heads of State for five-year terms. From 2007 to 2017 Tui Atua Tamasese Efi was Head of State. Since 2017 Tuimalealiifano Va’aletoa Sualauvi II has been the Samoan Head of State.
Samoa had no universal suffrage from 1962 to 1990. During that time only matai (of which the English word chief is the closest equivalent in meaning) were allowed to vote. Since 1990 there has been universal suffrage but forty-nine seats are reserved for matai and two are reserved for non-Samoan voters who can elect anyone. This means that the Fono is very conservative. A sign of that conservativism is that Christianity has been the state religion since 2017.
The Prime Minister is the leader of the largest political party in the Fono. Until the founding of the Human Rights Protection Party (the HRPP) in 1979 Samoa didn’t have any political parties. The Prime Minister was elected by the majority of Fono members and decision making was by consensus. From its foundation in 1979 until the 2021 elections the HRPP totally dominated the Fono. From 2006 to 2020 there was no official Opposition because none of the other parties in the Fono had enough members to form an Opposition. In Samoa, a political party has to have a minimum of eight members in the Fono to form an Opposition political party.
Under the HRPP the Samoan economy went from a virtually feudalistic, subsistence economy that depended upon foreign aid and remittances from Samoans working abroad (mostly from New Zealand) to a more modern, Capitalist, economy. However, it has only been within the last ten years that Samoa has experienced a major improvement in its economy. Most of that is due to heavy Chinese investment in its infrastructure. New roads, nationwide electricity generation and supply and the construction and expansion of its port in Apia, so it can take small to medium-sized container shops, has improved the Gross Domestic Product of Samoa. The wage economy of Samoa has grown dramatically with this investment from China and other Asian countries including Japan. (It was the Japanese who expanded Apia’s port.) However, this has come at a cost to Samoan society.
Samoans returning home from New Zealand and elsewhere are not returning to their traditional villages. Instead, they’re settling in Apia and establishing businesses. This means that the wage economy has become much more important.
Traditionally, Samoans could rely on rent-free housing and communally owned farms to survive. These provided Samoans with their social security net. With the emergence of Capitalist economics begging and other signs of real hardship gave started to make an appearance. Furthermore, the economy is still very dependent upon the tourism industry (which has taken a battering from the Covid-19 pandemic); cash crops including bananas, copra (the flesh of a coconut) cocoa beans, rubber and coffee; and money sent home to Samoa from families living in New Zealand.
Indeed, there are 182,000 Samoans living in New Zealand, 112,000 living in the United States and a few hundred thousand living elsewhere. This means that many of Samoa’s best and brightest people are overseas, attracted by the prospect of better educational and employment opportunities elsewhere.
The growth of Capitalism has put a lot of pressure upon the communal land ownership of the Samoans. Despite assurances by the (then) Prime Minister to the contrary, the passage of the Land Titles Registration Act in 2008 opened the way for individual land ownership and many Samoan matai and their families have been put under pressure to sell their land. After protests in Apia in December 2017 further assurances were made that “land would remain in the hands of the heirs of the relevant matai [chiefly] title”.
It was plans to undertake constitutional changes, including the removal of customary land courts from Supreme Court oversight, was a key factor in the creation of the Samoa United In Faith (Faʻatuatua i le Atua Samoa ua Tasi – FAST) party prior to the 2021 elections.
There was no doubt that the shock victory that led to the FAST party winning twenty-five seats – the same number of seats won by the HPRR – was also because they supported the restriction of the Prime Minister to two terms in office and their call to decentralise services to village level.
The shock FAST party victory sparked a major constitutional crisis when the one independent member of Parliament Tuala Iosefe Ponifasio found herself holding the balance of power. The HRPP disputed the election results. On April 23rd, 2021, the Electoral Commissioner announced that the Head of State Tuimalealiifano Va’aletoa Sualauvi II had created a 52nd electoral seat and given it to a member of the HRPP and ordered a snap election, calling the previous election null and void, when the Supreme Court challenged the creation of this 52nd seat.
On May 17th, 2021, the Supreme Court declared the 52nd seat unconstitutional as well as the call for a snap election. Yet, when members of the FAST party went to take their seats in the Fono and to be sworn in they found the doors of the Fono and the police had surrounded the building on the orders of the Speaker of the House who was a memoir of the HRPP. As long as they could not enter the Fono the FAST party could not be sworn in.
The crisis was resolved (for now) on July 23rd, 2021, with the Court of Appeal declaring that the FAST party was the new government and the new Prime Minister was Naomi Mata’afa. By the end of July her government had been recognised by the Commonwealth of Nations, the European Union, the Chinese government and the governments of Australia, New Zealand and other Pacific Island states.
It is too early to tell what the longer-term ramifications of the Samoan constitutional crisis will be and how reformist the FAST party might be but, considering that a party that didn’t even exist a year ago managed to oust an entrenched political party, the events in Samoa can only be called a tsunami.
Although the fact FAST appeared almost out of nowhere and won the election out of the blue it doesn’t mean there is anything sinister about that. To assume the hidden hand of the Central Intelligence Agency or some other imperialist intelligence agency is lurking behind the scenes does a disservice to Samoan politics.
It’s important to bear in mind that, while the FAST party itself is new, the people involved with it are not. They are mostly disgruntled HRPP members who’ve been involved in Samoan politics for a very long time. The question is what will they do now that they are in control of the Fono and in control of the government? It’s one thing to oppose the HRPP. It’s quite another to actually do something that will benefit the people of Samoa.
If FAST does deliver on its promises the ramifications will be far-reaching. The power is moving away from the villages. A new force is emerging and that is the power of the emerging Samoan working classes.
Not only have the infrastructure projects and the creation of new businesses created a rapidly growing working class but many of the ex-pat Samoans returning home have been exposed to trade unionism (albeit a watered-down reformist version of it) and some Samoans have even been exposed to Marxist ideas about class consciousness and class warfare as well as revolutionary ideas such as dialectical and historical materialism as well as permanent revolution.
We must also be aware of the influence of Christian fundamentalism in Samoan society. Conspiracy theories about vaccinations spread through many churches played a key role in the spread of a measles epidemic that infected 5707 people and killed eighty-three people in January 2020. It’s likely that a party with a name like Samoa United In Faith could be doing the bidding of religious fundamentalists behind the scenes. The history of colonialism in the Pacific region has shown that where the religious fanatics and the missionaries go the imperialist powers are sure to follow.
For now, Samoa is going through big changes. All we know for certain is that we must be ready to act when the opportunity for revolutionary change comes to Samoa. A major step towards ensuring revolutionary change can happen in Samoa is by ensuring we reach out to a large number of working-class Samoans here in New Zealand and educate them about collective class consciousness which they can bring to the working classes in Samoa.