THE RECORD — a weekend series - No. 7, Wiliam Titipe Powi, MP, Governor Southern Highlands Province

by PAUL L. KEBAIJA

William Powi has run Southern Highlands for the better part of twenty years. In neither of the last two elections did he win a count that was allowed to finish.

He came in through the emergency door. The National Executive Council made him acting provincial administrator from 17 May 2006. When the state of emergency was declared that August, he was assistant controller as well as administrator. That September a Gazette notice revoked his appointment. The next Gazette carried a public notice calling the revocation defective and void, and insisting Powi was still administrator. In 2011 he was still acting in the post after his contract had expired. In 2012 he moved from the administration into the vacant regional seat, and he has held it ever since. On the 2018 subnational figures, Southern Highlands' HDI of 0.479 ranked 21st of 22 provinces. That is the scorecard. Everything else is press release.

It is a rumor later confirmed by David Wakias (former Election Manager Southern Highands) Powi promised K5 Million if he (Wakias) delivered the Governorship to him, so in the middle of the day during counting in 2012, Wakias stopped the counting at Momei oval and went over to Mendi Valley Club (Clive Steele Club) and turned then over the election by counting and giving him the deciding votes to make him governor.

That specific bribe has not been proven in a published court judgment. What is on the record is messier and, in its way, more damning: a 2012 count already riddled with disputed boxes, rejected votes from Powi’s Nipa-Kutubu base, revolving returning officers, and Wakias himself in the middle of the machinery.

2017 removed any remaining romance. Counting in Mendi collapsed into armed clashes between Powi and Joseph Kobol camps. People died. Ballot boxes sat uncounted. Then-Electoral Commissioner Patilias Gamato used the Organic Law’s “special circumstances” power to declare Powi anyway. When a later court decision went against the petition challenging that win, Mendi answered in the only language the town has been taught to speak.

An Air Niugini Dash-8 was destroyed on the tarmac. The courthouse burned. Powi’s residence burned. A state of emergency followed. News reported the mob’s own explanation: they believed the election had been stolen and the courts would not say so.

Justice David Cannings later did say so, at least for a time. In August 2021 he held that Powi had not been duly elected, because he had not reached an absolute majority and the special-circumstances declaration had been misapplied. Cannings ordered a recount and suspended Powi from the office he had not lawfully won, on full pay, because that is how PNG treats its political class. The Supreme Court in July 2022 quashed the lot and dismissed Pastor Bernard Kaku’s petition. Process ate substance. Powi stayed.

Then 2022 did it again. Counting in Mendi was again wrecked. Ballot boxes were burned at the police station. Electoral Commissioner Simon Sinai declared Powi from Hohola in Port Moresby under the same special-circumstances clause, the second consecutive time. Progressive figures published during the count had at one stage put Peter Nupiri ahead. Peter O’Neill, no saint himself, called it a hijacking of democracy: a man “outwardly rejected by the people” installed from the capital while boxes remained uncounted.

Southern Highlands is not a poor province on paper. It sits on oil and gas. It has taken PSIP, DSIP/IDG flows, MRDC and Petroleum Resources Kutubu streams, Kroton/LNG-related dividends, and a slice of provincial BSP equity later carved with Hela under a benefit-split deal. Powi has stood at the podium for those cheques. He has also gone to Parliament to cry that the Mendi–Nipa road is not being sealed, a K221.8 million contract on which the Works Department said the contractor had already been paid close to K120 million, a figure the contractor then disputed downward while still admitting tens of millions received and the seal unfinished. A governor who has been the receiving hand for more than a decade does not get to play the neglected petitioner. That is the definition of hypocrisy

Michael Nali's (former MP for Mendi) companies took at least K21 million in Southern Highlands contracts under Powi’s governorship, including a televised K2 million cheque Powi himself handed over for a Kagua-Erave administration building. In 2013 the local Business Coalition Against Corruption asked Powi to cancel a hire-car deal reportedly worth K3 million and potentially far more, at K900 a vehicle a day. Powi refused; it was, he said, a normal tender and a public-private partnership. Company records showed Powi as sole shareholder of Southern Highlands Holdings Limited before the shares moved to the provincial government, with Nali and lawyer Stanley Liria on the board.

Powi's own 2013 budget booked K56.6 million in provincial revenue, including K2 million in BSP dividends and K2.3 million from PRK. In 2021 he agreed to hand Hela 40 per cent of the province's BSP and PRK equity. Where are the audited figures for what those shares have paid since, and what the money bought?
In July 2025 Powi stood up in Parliament over the stalled Mendi–Nipa road. The contractor, Sape Molumi of Construct Oceanic, answered publicly. He said he had been paid about K74.5 million, not the K120 million the Works Minister claimed. K147 million of the contract remained, and half the work, including base course and sealing, was still undone.

Molumi is the same engineer who chaired the Games host committee and stayed on, by Cabinet decision in 2024, to finish the Oiyarep stadium. Powi had told the assembly years earlier that Molumi should carry on the good work. When the governor asks Waigani why the road is stuck, he is asking after a contract held by a man he has publicly backed for years. Voters deserve to know that before they applaud.
Powi bid for the PNG Games in 2015, admitting the province had nothing to host them in. By 2024 the event had been deferred five times, and Cabinet had approved K270 million to stage it. When claims surfaced that K30 million had been diverted, the provincial government called them misleading and said the money was in Oiyarep and related works.

Powi's defence writes itself. He was cleared of contempt, he beat every petition, and his rival was charged over the ballot burning. His government says the Games money is in concrete, and it points to tuition relief and bridges. Some of that is true. None of it explains why, after twenty years, the count, the courthouse and the Games all keep failing in the same direction.

Southern Highlands does not owe William Powi another term because he has outlasted everyone else. Longevity is not consent. Before 2027, voters should ask him for three things: a count finished in public, acquittals published in full, and a list of every contractor he has a business or political tie to. Until then, his most accurate title is not Governor, you make your own..... halendo!!