Despite Opposition's election enticements



Samoa's opposition Democratic United Party (DUP) has begun campaigning for a 2006 general election the ruling Human Rights Protection Party (HRPP) can count on winning.

The DUP is offering such enticements as a monthly pension increase and cash benefits for big families. These are unlikely to have much appeal to an electorate appreciative of the stability, improving standards of government and a degree of prosperity that the HRPP government has brought to the country.

A bout of furore in the fono (parliament) had an element of theatrical drama. It began in April when the Samoa Observer published a letter in which the DUP deputy leader, Asiata Saleimoa Va'ai, alleged that the Speaker, Toleafoa Fa'afisi, gave a prejudiced ruling that favoured the government.

The letter was written in protest to the International Parliamentary Union and the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association.

Parliament's ethics and privileges committee, dominated by the government, said Asiata was guilty of contempt. He was suspended by the Speaker without pay for four months, a penalty he said, he would contest in court as being unconstitutional.

In April, the DUP walked out from a meeting of parliament in protest against the Speaker's refusal to allow debate on the committee's report. It said it was also protesting against the speaker's refusal to recognise a decision two years ago to change its name from the Samoa National Development Party. It returned after a few days absence.

The announced DUP election platform is a promise of legislation to allow expatriate Samoans to vote from abroad in recognition of the millions of dollars remitted home by them annually. The party dismissed the prime minister's criticism that to allow such a vote would open Samoa to control from abroad by 300,000 expatriate Samoans, 150 percent more than the resident population. Only 30,000 would be eligible to vote, it said.

Other DUP campaign promises are for an increase in a S$100 monthly pension, the renewal of a campaign for New Zealand citizenship for Samoans in view of New Zealand's former role as the Samoa's colonial ruler, allowances for families with many children, and the blocking of sales of customary land to foreigners.

Samoa's western-style parliamentary and judicial systems clash from time to time with its powerful Polynesian culture.

A member of parliament, Autagavaia Lave, has been banished from his village after an incident that led to several matai (village chiefs) being convicted of contempt of court. They had ignored an injunction against entering a plantation at Savai'i where a house was burnt down and cattle allegedly slaughtered.

The plantation is owned by O F Nelson Properties Ltd whose chairman, a former prime minister and now member of the Council of Deputies, Tuiatua Tupua Tamasese Efi, is in a dispute with the matai over excavations at an important archaeological site. The matai claimed the work was desecration of ancestral burial grounds.

The MP said he didn't know why he had been banished, a form of traditional punishment, which was ruled recently by the high court to be unconstitutional. However, he had differences with the matai about how the dispute should be settled.

Samoa's Court of Appeal has, meanwhile, cut by S$16,400 a Supreme Court award of S$150,000 damages to a family expelled from the village of Lotofaga by the village counsel. The appeal court's three overseas judges warned village councils to petition for a court order before banishing anyone. Eleven other village families must share the cost of the award.
Revelations of corruption in the customs department have surfaced with the leak of a letter to the Public Service Commission in which a former audit consultant alleged that a former cabinet minister, a senior official, and others were involved in a scheme used to obtain about S$217,000 from customs revenue as “loans”.

The department's chief auditor and controller has begun investigating what he described in a January 2005 letter to the minister for customs as a “very serious calculated scheme”, involving collusion by senior customs officers in diverting revenue to themselves.

Charges have been laid against two officials, and a former customs official is to be extradited from New Zealand.

Police and the attorney-general's office in April were in the last stage of criminal investigations at the health ministry, where the chief executive has been suspended. The former head of the ministry's corporate services was charged with false accounting, and the former chief of the health service was charged with allegedly mismanaging the ministry's funds.

The prime minister dismissed an opposition demand for a commission of inquiry into the health service. The opposition rejected his claim that trouble in the department was being adequately investigated by various parliamentary sub-committees. It complained there were too many discrepancies and inefficiencies in the service.