By Staff Writer
The Lands and Titles Court won a huge historical step with an overwhelming vote in Parliament this week on Tuesday 15 December 2020, but not without a bruising fight.
MP Fiame Naomi Mataafa resigned as Deputy Prime Minister in protest over the Constitutional Amendments to allow the LTC to stand-alone.
The Samoa Law Society was up in arms at the wide range of fundamental legal challenges it will open up in the judiciary system.
The Parliament Select Committee was locked up in office for weeks that extended into months to hear out public opinion.
A protest by a political group lit the fire of controversy at the very outset of heated public debate.
The long hours of deliberations for the Select Committee went even longer.
As if staying copped up for hours inside a conference rooms was not enough, they decided to ‘tour’ the villages.
The Committee wanted to get up close and person with the village folks to hear what they have to say.
“An overwhelming 84 per cent of opinions supported the Constitutional amendments but with a few tweaks they would like to see,” Minister of Justice Fa’aolesa Katopau Ainuu said in Parliament.
He also noted 13 percent of the opinions rejected outright the proposed amendments but without any offer of better options.
Listed among the expressed public anxieties the Minister raised were the loss of individual rights, customary lands and having a fourth branch of Government added.
When the Select Committee report finally came up for debate in Parliament on Tuesday, the raging battles came down to a ‘Clash of the Cousins’.
Fiame in her new role as opposition MP became a ball of fury. Rarely has the former Deputy PM as vocal in House debate as she was this week.
Her former Cabinet colleague and Chairperson of the Parliament Select Committee, Gatoloaifa’ana Amataga Gidlow, stood firm against the thrashing onslaught.
The Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi and other more outspoken members on the Government side were unusually quiet.
Did they have full confidence in the Select Committee Chairperson or members of the Committee who stood in defence of MP Fiame’s ‘smacking whip’?
Was there a deliberate move for Government to refrain from comment to speed up the debate into a vote?
In the end the House drowned out Fiame and a few others who can be counted with the fingers in one hand, when the vote was finally take to pass the Constitutional amendments into law.
The signature by the Head of State is all that is now left of the highly contentious Constitutional changes in the Lands and Tittles Court.
Whether the debate is finally put to rest is another question. For now it is. But Government agrees it is early days yet and it is still a work in progress.