By Mataeliga Pio Sioa
Seeing PM Fiame in a wheelchair attending Government high level meetings outside Samoa is not a re-assuring sight. First impression.
After giving her health concerns some thought, worrying scenarious started to pop up everywhere. Multiple impressions.
Her 5-year-term in office is not even halfway through. She would like to have her debilitating health be the least of her worries in her status of leadership.
Samoa is struggling out of COVID 19 health restrictions that have contracted the national economy.
Building our finances back up is her primary responsibility.
Tourism is down. It is our main money earner after remittances. Getting our tourism up on its feet again is no ‘jive-walking’ into the aircraft.
But if you do walk funny out of the terminal onto the tarmac and into the flight, the odds are it is because you have just emptied your pockets on a costly airfare.
The ‘debate on ‘should we or should we not’ have our own aircraft for our national carrier Samoa Airways to operate is still alive.
Remittances from our unskilled RSE labour force have stood us in good stead throughout the pandemic.
But it has come at the rapid depletion of our skilled workers who earn much more from picking fruits than sitting behind a desk all day
What they send home in one season pays off bank loans for homes, cars, and putting the children through schools.
The challenge for Fiame and her FAST Government is to balance off the rights of the skilled workers to make their own choices.
To blatantly stop them from making their own employment decisions to prevent against the loss of skills is poor leadership and an injustice to their individual rights.
Public servants celebrated their annual workers day last Friday – the first since the COVID 19 shelved it a few years back.
While it was good to see them mark the special occasion it was depressing to note they were not as lively and expressive as they usually are in previous get togethers.
Has it got to do with ‘last minute directives’ from their political masters to march and assemble in front of the Government Building lawn?
The forced march was the whisper in the early morning gathering obviously fearful of being overheard.
Is this fear of the ‘bosses of the bosses’ have anything to do with the brutal broom sweep of CEOs and other senior officers, the FAST Government did when they took up power last year?
Herein is another despised loose end that Fiame must make good.
Overall, these are just a few of the challenges to her Government she must fix up with the support of her party members.
To succeed, she will need all the help she can get including above all a good working health.
Fiame must see out the full term to heed off any possible power struggle for her seat if she is forced by poor health to step aside.
Infighting inside the ruling party is not going to do any good to them and to us as a country still struggling with the division politics they have left us in.
Will deputy PM Tuala Ponifasio transition to the top be a formality?
Why not? Is there a party policy that requires FAST members to re-elect a new party leader who will also become the PM?
Tuala has been very active as acting PM in the absence of Fiame showing up seemingly everywhere to speak on behalf of his leader and Government.
His main rival for the PM’s job must be the Minister of Agriculture who is also Chairman of FAST Laauli Schmidt. The man has been busy traveling in and out of the country to attend meetings since his Cabinet appointment.
He does have a popular following in the villages as the person who promised $1m cash handouts every year for 5 years when and if FAST is voted into power as it was.
For Fiame perhaps the biggest challenge in her time in office is to restore harmony to a badly politically divided Samoa. The question is whether that is possible within her term of leadership.
What makes it quite challenging is her every move is watched and followed with a critical eye.
When the people who do that are in the opposition side of Parliament and led by a former PM she had worked under for decades, then it is a daunting task not to be caught out on the wrong foot.
Poor health is going to hamper rather than help.
Hearts go out to Fiame seeing her sitting on her wheelchair far away from home.
She has been on a grueling diplomacy run all these three-four weeks and we all wish her good health.
She does have a hard reality at home to return to. Poor health is not going to help.
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