SAMOA’S former prime minister Fiamē Naomi Mataʻafa has called for governments across the Pacific to create formal platforms where citizens, non-government organisations and governments can work together.
“Because we are small, we need to pull all our resources,” she said, adding that “our governments are not enough”.
Mataʻafa said Pacific governments must allow people outside government to play a larger role in the region’s progress and development.
“We need everyone to be standing up and playing their part,” she said during the 2nd Pasifika Philosophies Leadership Weaving Futures Conference
“And the challenge for our governments is to allow that to happen.”
She said intergovernmental institutions were inviting broad, cross-sectoral representation to meetings, but the information gathered was then being fitted into government frameworks.
“They want to harvest the information, the data, the stories, but then it has to be neatly fitted into the frameworks of these government agencies,” she said.
Mataʻafa recommended that the region develop “formal, officially acknowledged platforms” where governments, citizens and non-government sectors could continue to exchange views.
“Where governments may have to follow a particular path because of the framing that governments work under, we must also look at how there is continuance of this broader forum and the interchange and exchange between peoples, citizens, and our respective governments,” she said.
Empowered Leadership Insights
Her remarks drew on more than 40 years in government and a long involvement at the cabinet level, which she said ran from 1991 up to last year. She described silence at the cabinet table as a barrier to robust collective decision-making.
“Someone say their piece, then suddenly there’s sort of a tacit agreement,” Mataʻafa said. She described the practice as “the courtesy of silence”: “If you don’t speak up on my issue, I promise not to speak up on your issue.”
Mataʻafa said leadership required more than authority. In the Samoan context, she said, chiefs or matais were also caretakers responsible for people, property, assets and spiritual elements within the family, village, district and national politics.
“We not only lead, but we also take care of people,” she said.
She linked that understanding of leadership to her own path into public life. Mataʻafa said she received the high-ranking Fiamē title at the age of 20, after her father died when she was 18.
Her title was contested in the Lands and Titles Court, where she said there were 23 parties and 13 candidates.
“I’m telling you this story to underscore the importance of the rule of law, and actually being able to benefit from the protections of that rule of law,” she said.
Mataʻafa said her vision for Samoa had been “a samoa where people want to stay, and where they have a stake in things, and where they will invest on themselves”.
She extended that question to the wider Pacific: “What is it for us in the Pacific that will make people want to stay in our region and invest in our region for the progress and development of our peoples?”
She ended with a Samoan saying about communal, prayerful support, saying leadership was not more important than the support of those around it.
“Leadership is not more important than the prayerful support of those around us.”
