THE MAN WHO WANTS TO BE PRIME MINISTER

by MICHAEL J. PASSINGAN

Southern Highlands Governor William Powi wants voters to know he has ambition. Explaining in The National on 23 September why he never founded a party, he said this should not be mistaken for a lack of ability, vision or “leadership ambition”. In the same statement he urged the province’s leaders to unite so its priorities reach whatever government forms after 2027, and asked his critics to stick to facts.

Under section 63 of the Organic Law on the Integrity of Political Parties and Candidates, the Governor-General must invite the party with the most MPs to form government after an election. That rule does not apply to a vote of no confidence. A governor without a party of his own has no claim on the first route. His path to the top runs through someone else’s party or through the floor of Parliament, and on both routes the currency is a bloc of votes. A united Southern Highlands bench, the governor plus five open members, is six of them. Unity has been his line before. In April 2025 he urged the province’s MPs on both sides of the House to ignore a looming no-confidence vote and stick together.

His party record does not read like a leader’s. When the Registrar confirmed his move from PNC to Pangu in May 2020, Powi said he had no intention of joining any other party and told The National: “Since being elected in 2012, I didn’t believe in jumping from party to party.” By 2024 he was Pangu’s Highlands leader, welcoming defectors in the name of “stability and continuity”. A year out from the election, Pangu’s man in the Highlands will not say Pangu should govern. He says only that the province will be ready for whoever does.

A prime minister needs a mandate, and Powi’s last two did not come from a finished count. His 2017 win was confirmed only after months of court disputes and deadly violence that forced the count out of the province. When the National Court dismissed a challenge in June 2018, rioters in Mendi burned an Air Niugini Dash 8, the courthouse and Powi’s own home. The national government declared a nine-month state of emergency and suspended the provincial government. That year, K300,000 and 300 pigs were paid at Semin, where he spoke last week, for three of his supporters who died during the 2017 election. In August 2021, Justice David Cannings ruled Powi had not been duly elected in 2017, finding the special-circumstances power misapplied and the declaration made in private.

In 2022 he was declared under special circumstances again, after 135,023 ballot papers were burnt in Mendi and reporters were refused the detailed count. O’Neill called it a “travesty against democracy”. Three petitions were filed against that result. Two were withdrawn. The third was struck out because the filing and the K5,000 security deposit were lodged on different dates, and the Supreme Court upheld the dismissal. The 2022 result has never been tested on its merits.

Powi has offered his own yardstick. “You measure service delivery by the institutions you leave behind,” he said in 2024, when the Mendi courthouse burned in 2018 was still only almost complete. He has conceded that for nearly 20 months the province received no projects or services. The roads Marape credited to his provincial government in 2022, East Pangia and the Wiru Loop, sit in O’Neill’s Ialibu-Pangia electorate. They were built with O’Neill’s district funds and an Asian Development Bank program whose contract the NEC awarded in March 2017, while O’Neill was prime minister.