Samoa is on a path where big corporations and powerful business interests can slowly take its future out of the hands of her own children.
Why?
Because inside man there is greed. There is hunger for money. There is hunger for power. History has already shown us what happens when those things are allowed to grow without limits.
So I keep coming back to one question.
What is Samoa without Samoa?
What is our small land if Samoans eventually lose control over what happens on it?
What are our villages without the families who belong to them?
What is Samoa if its children cannot afford to live there?
What is an island nation if it cannot protect the ocean that feeds it?
Samoa is actually not small when we include our ocean. Our Exclusive Economic Zone covers about 120,000 square kilometres, around 40 times the size of our land. The Government’s own Samoa Ocean Strategy recognises that this ocean supports our food, livelihoods, fisheries and communities. That is not empty water around us. That is part of Samoa too.
Then look at what is happening right beside us in American Samoa.
Tutuila is our neighbour and aiga, sitting next door under the authority of a powerful outside power, the United States.
In April 2025, a United States-based company called Impossible Metals made an unsolicited request to the U.S. Government to begin a leasing process for deep-sea minerals off American Samoa.
But who owns the rights? And who gets to lease those rights out? What about royalties? How long can those rights be handed over for?
Further out, in the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf, those rights are controlled by the United States federal government, which can lease access to private companies.
For the other Samoa, the Government holds sovereign rights over the natural resources within our Exclusive Economic Zone, including resources beneath the seabed.
So if one day valuable minerals, oil or gas are found under our waters, the question will be what Samoa agrees to give away.
For how long?
For how much?
And who will still be benefiting from that agreement fifty years from now?
The area originally identified covered about 73,222 square kilometres of ocean floor.
Think about that number.
The Independent Samoa has a land area of only about 2,800 square kilometres.
One company looked underneath our oceans and saw nickel, cobalt, manganese and copper across an area many times larger than Samoa itself.
Minerals needed for batteries, electronics, industry and military technology.
Money sitting on the bottom of the Pacific.
That company made the request.
The machinery of government then began moving.
The United States Government is now considering a competitive mineral lease sale in waters off American Samoa, with a proposed sale date of 19 November 2026. Its own documents describe these minerals as important to American supply chains, manufacturing, energy and national security.
Read that again.
National security.
Whose national security?
Whose industries?
Whose supply chains?
Whose minerals?
Whose ocean?
These are the questions small Pacific nations need to learn to ask before somebody arrives carrying a proposal filled with numbers, jobs, investment and promises of prosperity.
American Samoa’s leaders have already expressed opposition to commercial seabed mining. Their government has a moratorium on seabed mineral exploration and extraction within the waters it controls. Yet the federal process concerning the surrounding U.S. Outer Continental Shelf has continued.
That alone should teach us something about power.
Once minerals underneath the Pacific become economically valuable enough, the people who will come looking for them will not arrive with shovels.
They will arrive with lawyers.
Scientists.
Lobbyists.
Investors.
Government relationships.
Environmental reports.
Economic models.
Technology nobody in our villages owns.
And billions of dollars behind them.
They will know exactly what they want before many of us even understand what is underneath our own ocean.
The first company is not what worries me the most.
It is what happens after the first door opens.
Because if deep-sea minerals around the Samoan islands prove commercially valuable, do we really believe only one company will become interested?
America will be interested.
China will be interested.
Other governments will be interested.
Mining companies will be interested.
Investment funds will be interested.
Technology companies that need these minerals will be interested.
Prospectors with money will look across the Pacific and see only money.
But we see the moana sausau, even feel its spirit and soul.
We have forgotten to see the natural source of healthy island foods that the supermarket owners have almost completely wiped from our minds because they rather you find the money to spend at their store than you finding and growing your own food.
We are starting to see a fracturing genealogy of strong navigators.
We used to see our villages sitting beside the sea, singing our pese.
And we still see the places where our forefathers and grandfathers fished.
We see our inheritance swept away by the greed of others for the fake paper money that buys plastics and useless instant noodles.
There is great danger in foreigners seeing mineral deposits in our oceans.
Greed does not need everybody to be greedy to destroy nature, it just needs a handful and their authorities will say yes.
And once the money becomes large enough, somebody will always explain why saying yes is supposedly necessary for development.
Jobs.
Revenue.
Economic growth.
Infrastructure.
Foreign investment.
The same words will be used again and again.
Then perhaps the next government expands it.
Another company arrives.
Another licence.
Another exploration area.
Another agreement.
Another argument that Samoa cannot afford to turn down the money.
Until one day we discover that although the ocean still surrounds us, decisions about what happens underneath it are being driven somewhere else.
That is what I mean when I ask what is Samoa without Samoa.
Our ocean cannot become the next gold rush.
The old gold prospectors crossed mountains looking for land nobody had claimed before them.
The new prospectors have satellites, autonomous machines, artificial intelligence, sonar, international lawyers and enormous capital.
And now they are looking down.
Thousands of metres beneath the Pacific.
Samoa should already be preparing for that world.
Where is our independent scientific knowledge of what is actually beneath our seabed?
Where are our marine geologists?
Where are our environmental scientists?
Where are our lawyers studying deep-sea mining law?
Where are our economists modelling what Samoa would actually gain and what it might permanently lose?
Where is the national policy that says clearly what cannot be negotiated regardless of how much money is offered?
We should know these things before anybody knocks on the door.
Not after.
Because by the time the prospectors arrive with the money, it is already too late to begin learning what they know.
António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, said something during his address to the 81st Session of the UN General Assembly that Samoa should listen to carefully.
He said the world is witnessing an “extraordinary transfer of power away from governments to a handful of private corporations and individuals.”
He then spoke about another transfer of power, from humans to machines, warning about artificial intelligence agents and lethal autonomous weapons.
His point was power.
Who controls it. Who loses it. Where it is moving.
He was talking about the world, but Samoa should be listening.
Small countries have to be more careful than large countries because we have less room for mistakes.
A bad policy in a country of hundreds of millions of people can eventually be changed and absorbed. In Samoa, decisions involving land, infrastructure, food, telecommunications, labour and foreign investment can alter the country itself.
Money cannot be the only measurement.
We have already become heavily dependent on money coming from Samoans overseas. The World Bank records personal remittances received by Samoa at 22.4 percent of GDP in 2025. That money represents sacrifice. Parents, children, brothers and sisters overseas work and send money home because they love their families. There is nothing wrong with that.
The danger comes when we begin treating that money as an economic system.
Our relatives overseas cannot forever be the emergency department for every family problem in Samoa.
We need to produce.
We need to learn.
We need to build.
We need to understand how the world around us works so that we are not just consumers of what other people create.
Education is part of how we protect Samoa, but I do not mean education only as obtaining degrees and wearing gowns.
Some of our older generation have already lost knowledge that should have been passed down.
How many of us can still lalaga a laupola?
How many know how to build a faleoo properly using the old methods?
How many know our old medicines and medicinal plants?
How many know how to make a taufolo?
How many know how to lalaga an afa, prepare the coconut husk and work the fibres properly?
How many know how to fish using the knowledge that existed before supermarkets?
How many understand the rainforest well enough to survive from it?
How many young Samoans can plant enough food to actually feed their household?
How many know their own genealogy beyond grandparents?
Some people know more about somebody on TikTok than they know about the people whose blood runs through them.
That should worry us.
Our gagana can someday disappear. We have witnessed first hand our traditional knowledge and skills that our forefathers used to survive disappearing. And our gafa, will it disappear to?
It is useless to stand on a land while our relationship with it disappears completely.
Then one day somebody asks what happened to the old Samoa and there is nobody alive who knows the answer.
Our ancestors understood the importance of land.
Article 102 of the Constitution of Samoa does something extraordinary. It expressly prevents the alienation or disposition of customary land through sale, mortgage or other means, while allowing Parliament to authorise leases or licences and the taking of land for public purposes.
The constitutional protection is there, but it does not mean Samoans should stop watching what governments do around leases, legislation, development arrangements and land administration.
Customary land is not simply property. There is no Samoa without customary land. There is no Fa’a Samoa detached from the land indefinitely. There is no culture for very long when the language, genealogy and land underneath it disappear.
I am not saying Samoa should close itself to foreigners. That is foolish.
We need technology. We need capital. We need doctors. We need engineers. We need the know-how from outside. We need trade. We need relationships with other nations.
Maybe foreign money is not the enemy but losing control of it is.
If a company comes into Samoa, what remains in Samoa twenty years later?
That is the question. Did we gain any skills? How about ownership? Were local businesses created? Were young people trained? Did Samoa gain infrastructure? Did Samoa gain intellectual knowledge?
Did Samoa become more independent because of the investment, or more dependent on the company that brought it?
If the answer is that somebody extracted profits for twenty years and left, then we should at least have enough intelligence to understand what happened.
The same questions apply to large Samoan businesses.
Business is necessary. Successful Samoan companies should be encouraged.
But size brings responsibility.
If a business brings overseas labour into Samoa because workers can be obtained more cheaply, then we should ask what training pathway exists for Samoan workers.
If imported workers are needed because the skills genuinely do not exist locally, then train Samoans beside them.
Put knowledge transfer into the arrangement.
Five years later Samoa should have more skilled people than it had before.
Otherwise we keep renting other people’s knowledge.
Food is another place where we should be worried.
Walk into our shops and look at what we eat.
Packets. Cans. Sugar. Instant food. Processed food brought thousands of kilometres across the ocean into a country where things grow from the ground almost the entire year.
Our people have slowly been trained to choose convenience.
Instant noodles become easier than preparing real food.
Imported food becomes the new normal and planting now is something somebody else does. Then we wonder why our health system is under pressure.
The World Health Organization reports that noncommunicable diseases account for about 83 percent of deaths in Samoa. That does not mean every imported or processed food causes disease, but it should be enough to make us seriously examine what has happened to the way we eat and live.
There is land everywhere.
Grow something.
Teach the children what you are growing and why growing benefits them and the future. Teach what the grandparents called it.
That is food security and cultural security happening at the same time.
Then there is the internet.
Samoa talks about becoming digitally connected, but connectivity is not simply running fibre through the ground.
People have to be able to afford to use it.
The 2026 Samoa Submarine Cable Company reference offer approved by the Office of the Regulator still prices wholesale international capacity by Mbps under capacity leases. At 300 Mbps, the published international rate is US$44 per Mbps per month on a 36-month commitment. At 1,000 Mbps it is US$27.50 per Mbps per month.
That cost exists before an ISP has paid for the rest of the network, staff, equipment, support, electricity, tax and everything else required to deliver the connection to somebody’s house.
So when we talk about digital transformation, ask whether a young Samoan trying to build the next technology company can actually afford the infrastructure underneath it.
A fibre cable passing your village does not make you digitally empowered if meaningful access remains too expensive.
Government itself recognises this problem. Samoa is preparing the Digitally Connected and Resilient Samoa Project with World Bank financing, including national fibre infrastructure intended to improve connectivity and access.
Good.
Then make affordability one of the measurements of success. Not kilometres of fibre.
What does a family actually pay? What does a small business actually pay? What can they actually build with it?
The same thinking should apply to government spending.
The District Development Programme deserves proper examination because the amounts are now substantial.
For the 2025–2026 financial year, Parliament approved $91.8 million for all 51 districts, with $1.8 million allocated per district. The Government has also stated an intention for districts to receive $10 million each over the five-year development period.
Fine.
Then show us what the money created.
Not just what was spent.
How many permanent businesses came from it?
How many farms became commercially productive?
How many jobs still exist two years later?
How many water systems were fixed?
How many families became less dependent on government assistance?
How much money went directly into community development and how much eventually ended up with a small number of suppliers?
These are questions that should automatically follow public money.
Put the information online.
District by district.
Project by project.
Supplier by supplier.
Cost by cost.
Outcome by outcome.
Let the people see it.
Then there is the proposed specialist hospital in Savai’i.
The project deserves proper scrutiny because public land and public interest are involved. Questions have already been raised about the governance and shareholding structure of the Samoa company, and the developer subsequently announced a temporary pause while those arrangements were corrected.
Does Savai’i need better specialist healthcare?
Of course it does.
Samoa reportedly spends around $12 million tala each year sending patients overseas for medical treatment. If a properly governed specialist hospital in Savai’i can perform procedures that currently require Samoans to fly to Fiji, New Zealand or India, then examine the project on its actual merits rather than reducing everything to political fighting.
What is the alternative?
If somebody opposes the hospital, give Samoa another workable solution.
Our sick people cannot be treated with political speeches.
This is part of the problem I see.
Too much of our national conversation stops at supporting or opposing whatever the government of the day proposes.
We need analysts.
Where is Samoa’s permanent independent group of people studying what happened in other countries before we repeat it?
Economists.
Engineers.
Doctors.
Agricultural scientists.
Cybersecurity specialists.
Environmental scientists.
Lawyers.
Historians.
People who understand Fa’a Samoa.
People who understand technology.
People who understand global finance.
Not people appointed because they support somebody.
People whose job is to think twenty, thirty and fifty years ahead.
Before a major foreign investment is approved, ask them what Samoa gains.
Before a strategic asset is leased, ask what happens after the lease.
Before hundreds of millions are borrowed, model who eventually pays.
Before agricultural land is converted, measure what happens to food security.
Before another imported system is copied, ask whether it actually fits Samoa.
Other countries have already made many of the mistakes we are heading towards.
The data exists.
Study it.
New Zealand is useful for many things, but Samoa should not blindly copy New Zealand either. Life in New Zealand is increasingly expensive. Housing consumes enormous amounts of household income. Infrastructure is expensive. People work constantly just to service debt.
Why would Samoa deliberately reproduce every part of that system?
Take what works. Leave what does not. Build something Samoan.
We should also stop pretending endless economic growth is some law of God.
Can we ever say we have enough?
Do we really need to turn every piece of land into an economic opportunity?
Does every beach need a resort?
Does every road need shops?
Does everything need to make money?
Money is a tool created by humans.
It is not the reason humans exist.
If government does not have enough money, then ask what can be cut before borrowing more.
What programme achieves nothing?
What government expenditure exists because nobody has the courage to stop it?
What can Cabinet remove so that health, education, water, food security, infrastructure and essential services receive what they actually need?
These are adult questions.
Some politicians will not like them.
Some businesses will not like them.
Some families benefiting from the existing arrangements will not like them.
Ask anyway.
Public office cannot become a mechanism for protecting individual families.
Business success cannot come at the expense of the country that made that success possible.
Development cannot simply mean more money moving around.
Development should mean Samoa becoming harder to exploit. More educated. More capable. More productive. More technically competent. More food secure. More digitally capable. More protective of its land. More conscious of its history.
And more capable of saying no.
The Trojan horse was not dangerous because it looked frightening.
It was dangerous because Troy opened the gate.
That is the lesson.
Once something is inside the system and powerful enough, removing it becomes much harder.
Corporations understand generations, and Samoa needs to think the same way. Wealthy families send their children to the best schools, teach them how business works, pass assets down and prepare the next generation to continue what they built. Samoa should be just as deliberate about passing down knowledge, ownership, skills and responsibility.
Why should Samoa not think the same way about the whole country? We should be protecting our knowledge, land, language, ocean, food production and infrastructure while making sure our children understand both the modern world and the one they inherited. They need technology, finance and science, but also Fa’a Samoa, genealogy, planting, building and the practical knowledge that once allowed Samoan families to survive without depending on outside systems for everything.
Every young Samoan should know the life their grandparents knew.
That is what I mean by education. A Samoan child should be able to understand artificial intelligence, finance and global business without losing Fa’a Samoa, genealogy or the practical knowledge passed down through family. The world is changing quickly, corporations are becoming more powerful and capital now moves across borders almost instantly, so Samoa cannot afford to choose between modern knowledge and its own identity.
Information warfare now lives inside everybody’s phone.
The ferocious onslaught of brainwashing has grown horns on social media.
Every day something is trying to sell us a product, a lifestyle, a political belief, an identity, a fear, an enemy or an idea of what success should look like.
A small country that does not know itself is extremely easy to sell things to.
So where will you stand, Samoa?
This is bigger than any political party or politician. The real question is what kind of Samoa we are leaving behind.
A Samoa that can feed itself or one waiting for another container ship?
A Samoa whose children understand their land or one where land has become another financial instrument?
A Samoa that uses technology or one that is controlled by it?
A Samoa that welcomes investment on its own terms or one so hungry for money that it accepts whatever is placed in front of it?
A Samoa that remembers?
Or a Samoa that one day has money, buildings, fibre, cars, supermarkets and corporations everywhere, but can no longer answer the simplest question.
What is Samoa without Samoa?
