I asked if he had electricity.
‘Yes.’
I asked if he had hot and cold water.
‘No, just warm.’ There was a row of about 30 beer and soft-drink bottles on the floor. His kids collected them to sell for money.
‘It’s good to talk,’ he said. ‘I’ve been sick the last few months.’
He breathed heavily when he talked. I asked if he had heart disease.
‘No, pneumonia.’
His weight was the elephant in the fale, so I asked how much he weighed.
‘I think it’s 468,’ he said.
He wore a lavalava and no shirt. The lavalava revealed the classic build of a sumo wrestler, even two sumo wrestlers. But he was also a matai, a chief, with gentle eyes and a soft voice, and I thought of him as holy. His five young children crowded around him, eager for his touch. He picked them up like kittens and stroked their arms. I asked what he wanted them to achieve in life.
‘To serve God,’ he said.
The womanly prime minister was hospitable and rambling. We chatted about more or less absolutely nothing for 20 minutes. Just to get things rolling I remarked that Samoa’s situation seemed perfectly hopeless.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘there are always ways people can earn more and make a future for their children, but a lot of people don’t know or understand how to work the land. I know why people go to New Zealand. A salary is an attraction for them. But what a lot of people don’t know is that there are lots of outgoings to life in New Zealand. There are church commitments, remittance money to send home, bills. People say children can get a better education in New Zealand. But you can get the same education in Samoa. People say there’s a higher standard of living in New Zealand. But I encourage them to stay here and develop Samoa. We have the land. Opportunities are endless. We have lots and lots of coconuts.’
But there weren’t any jobs. According to US State Department figures, only eighteen percent of Samoa’s population were in salaried positions.
‘We used to export cocoa to Europe,’ the prime minister said, ‘high-flavoured cocoa. Now we export none. We need people to work on the land. Taro … bananas … inter-cropping … organic farming. …We offer people incentives but they don’t take advantage of them. People always grab the easier options.’
He seemed to be blaming Samoans for Samoa’s predicament. ‘I am giving you the view of a leader who needs all the hands he can use,’ he said. ‘We cannot speedily develop to give people jobs. Progress is being made but it’s slow.’ He mentioned Yazaki, a Japanese-owned auto parts company in Apia. ‘It’s the biggest one we ever captured.’ It employed a workforce of 2,000, but jobs were cut to about 800 after the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in 2011. ‘They’re still here,’ he said, ‘but they probably regret it, and want to leave, and are regretful they ever came here in the first place.’
This fell a bit short of inspirational. He was similarly downbeat in a newspaper story a few months later on the subject of a proposed multimillion-dollar Chinese-owned hotel. ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ he said. ‘Nothing has materialised from the big proposals we regularly get.’ The comments were made after he visited China on the way back from a United Nations Conference on Least Developed Countries in Turkey. The conference, too, aroused his temper. The UN had voted for Samoa to ‘graduate’ from Least Developed Country to Developing Country status. Samoa, the prime minister objected, wasn’t ready. The conference in Turkey had been ‘a waste of time’.
He had won three elections and been in power thirteen years. His ideas for changing Samoa’s way of life seemed whimsical – switching traffic from driving on the right to driving on the left, and altering Samoa’s position on the International Date Line, literally bringing the country up to date with the rest of the world. An opposition MP criticised the proposal. That MP, said Tuilaepa, was ‘very stupid’ and an ‘idiot’.
He was just as dismissive of TV3’s John Campbell’s attempts to ask him about allegations of misappropriated tsunami aid money. He sent TV3 a semi-literate letter of complaint. He wrote: ‘Please note I am signing this message and not by some other kind of idiot. Only idiots recognise and emphasise the importance of other idiots.’
You could say he threw his weight around. It was not a pretty sight. He sat behind his desk, massive and puffing, surrounded by toys. The gifts of leaders of many nations were displayed in cabinets and on walls.
It was Friday afternoon and he wanted to go home and watch rugby on TV. We made even idler chit-chat as he gathered his things. He kept his wristwatch on the desk in front of him ‘so I can watch it all the time’. The politician he most admired was Bill Clinton, ‘but of course what he did to that girl was very bad’. No, he said, he didn’t believe that God created the world in seven days. ‘He created the world instantly.’
I remembered to inform him that I’d been bitten by a dog.
‘Where?’
I stood up and showed him the livid red bite on my leg.
‘No, where did it happen?’
I told him.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘we have a programme of shooting wild dogs.’
On my last day I stumbled across Hell. On the way to the airport I had plenty of time, so I headed off along the coastal road and into the jungly interior, up a steep dirt track and on to a long dipping road, empty of traffic and people, until by chance I came to a prison. I’d read a few things about Tafa’igata Prison. It sounded like a terrible place. It was built during the German rule from 1900 to 1914. In 2010 the US State Department released a damning
