Samoan Politics

Dear Editor,

 

My greatest disappointment with Samoan politics is the Human Rights Protection Party’s focus on secrecy and selfishness. Politics is presented as an art that is mysterious, difficult and conducted away from the people for their benefit without their input.

Where are the great political thinkers, who should have arisen from thousands of years of oratorical debate?

I propose two principles to clean up Samoan politics:

1. Enshrine an `Aiga Principle into law so that all governmental decisions must benefit all Samoans unless there is a good reason.

2. Enshrine an `Exposition Principle into law requiring that all arguments for and against any policy at national and international level be fully considered, expounded and published for public consideration.

On July 11, 2011 J.B. Williams of NewsWithViews.com stated that a corrupt society cannot produce good government.

He says that `in any free society in which the people are the government, the buck stops with the people. Before the people can claim personal responsibility for turning [the] country around, they must accept personal responsibility for the current condition of [the] nation.

He describes, ` two kinds of participants, the active participant and the passive participant, those making it happen and those unwilling to stop it, thereby allowing it to happen. The active participants are the enemy we can all see. They are a minority

The passive participant is everyone else, and they make up the majority of citizens, whether or not they care to admit it.

...silence is your consent. Every time you allow evil to stand, evil gains ground and strength. Every time good people do nothing, evil prevails. Tolerating evil in any form at any level only brings about more evil. As a result, the true cost of tolerating the intolerable is a totally intolerable society, from which you can never draft good government.

Nobody’s perfect, we all make mistakes. But some mistakes are so costly that we cannot afford to make them more than once. Tolerating the intolerable is a very costly mistake and every day that passes without righting this error compounds the problem.

Running from personal responsibility is also a very costly mistake. If we are not responsible for our current condition through our apathy and silence, then we do not have the power to change the future.

Before we can proclaim responsibility for the future, we must accept responsibility for the past and present. That’s the bad news The good news is every day the sun rises for a new day and we have a new opportunity to change our own behaviours, alter our own decisions and direction and ultimately, our own destiny, individually and as a nation.

Our political talent is not good because that talent was drawn from a poisoned talent pool, our society, us.

We do at all times have a government of, by and for the people. Sadly, it is of, by and for corrupt self-centred people focused only upon their own personal agendas. We cannot turn over the table of political corruption by taking a seat at the table of corruption and dealing ourselves into the game. We must change the game, but we must be fit to change the game.

Before we can fix our government, we must first fix society. This requires accepting personal responsibility for where we are today and where we are headed tomorrow.

Waiting for any politician to fix this thing is like waiting for the tooth fairy to pay your mortgage. It just isn’t going to happen.

WE are the problem and still, WE are the ONLY solution we have!

But before we can turn this country around, we have to turn ourselves around. Stable people don’t need government assistance. Decent people don’t need laws. Fit people don’t need much health care and intelligent people don’t need a bunch of thieves telling them what they can and cannot do.

If you want to know who is going to fix this country, find a mirror. Not every [Samoan] is indecent. But the decent people have been bullied into sitting down and shutting up. They stand and speak up now, or they are part of the problem.

Only those willing to fight for freedom deserve freedom! There is no more time for pretenders and patriot profiteers only concerned with gaining a seat at the table of corruption and destruction. Good government can only come from decent people. The indecent people must go! Only the decent people can get rid of them!’

We, every single one of us, must be the change.

 

Maua Faleauto

[email protected]


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