Tongan Prime Minister Faces No Confidence Motion

In February, for only the second time in Tonga’s history, a motion of “no confidence” in the prime minister was submitted to the country’s Parliament. The motion accused Prime Minister Samiuela 'Akilisi Pōhiva of nepotism, not following due process, abusing his authority, and damaging the country's foreign relations.

The charge of nepotism has centered on Pōhiva’s hiring of his son Po’oi as his personal assistant. While Pōhiva had informed the Parliament that he would be paying for his son’s salary personally, the parliamentarians who brought the motion have been unhappy that when Po’oi was traveling with his father overseas on official state visits, the government was paying for his expenses.

Alongside this, the prime minister has been accused of appointing a number of high-ranking government officials without going through the due process of parliamentary approval. Pōhiva’s attempts to remove the attorney general and to replace the CEO of the Pacific Games Organizing Committee have also been deemed to be outside the authority of his office.

The list of charges against the prime minister also includes his attempt to influence the board of directors of the state-owned, but independent, Tonga Broadcasting Commission to dismiss one of the station’s presenters, whom he does not like. Pōhiva is also accused of wasting the government’s money, paying $50,000 to Forbes Magazine to publish an interview with himself and purchasing from a local businessman old and damaged construction equipment that the state has no use for.

In regards to the damage that Pōhiva has done to Tonga’s foreign relations, his decision to sign the United Nations’ Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and then withdraw Tonga’s signature has been seen as an embarrassment. Pōhiva is deemed to have given in to conservative elements in Tongan society that believed the ratification of the convention would lead to the legalization of both same-sex marriage and abortion. Pōhiva’s continued vocal support for the independence movement in West Papua has also strained the relationship between Tonga and Indonesia.

When Pōhiva obtained the prime ministership in 2014 he became the first person elected by the Parliament to hold the position who wasn’t from Tonga’s “noble” class (or appointed to the role by the king, as three previous non-noble prime ministers had been). Tongan society retains its own unique feudal-type system based on a hierarchy of the king, the land-owning nobles, the “matapule,” who act as custodians of Tongan traditions, and the “commoners” who make up the vast majority of the country’s 103,000 people. Pōhiva is a “commoner.”

In 2010 Tonga initiated some major democratic reforms. The Parliament was realigned so that 17 of its 26 seats would be elected by universal suffrage, with these seats being known as the “people’s representatives.” The remaining nine seats were reserved for the country’s nobility. Previously the prime minister and cabinet were appointed by the king, but the reforms created a system where these positions would be elected by the members of the Parliament instead.

These reforms shifted the country’s political model away from a heavy concentration of power in the hands of the king, toward the more hands-off ideals of a constitutional monarchy, where where the monarch remains the symbolic the head of state and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, but no longer holds any direct any executive and legislative powers.

Yet Tonga hasn’t moved entirely in the direction of the European constitutional monarchies. The king remains an active political figure, and at the time of the reforms he stressed that Tonga’s new constitutional monarchy was “different from other nominal monarchies which retain the trappings of monarchy, but actually govern themselves as republics.” Instead the king’s power is now exercised on the advice of the prime minister, with traditional matters being advised by the nobles and matapule.

While the evidence of the prime minister’s misuse of his position seems to be compelling, those  parliamentarians who backed the “no confidence” motion included seven of the nine nobles, but only three of the 17 people’s representatives. This indicates that despite these democratic reforms Tongan society remains quite stratified, posing the question of whether the accusations against Pōhiva are entirely accurate and a “no confidence” motion warranted, or whether there are political motivations for the motion driven by a social structure that is unfamiliar with someone from Pōhiva’s social class serving as Tonga’s prime minister. Or, of course, the situation very well may be a combination of the two.