Dear Editorial Board,

It’s always sad to see any of our government's public trading bodies fall into disrepute, such is the unfortunate case of our Samoa Airways as per your Editorial Friday December 10, 2021.

It was always going to be a hard sell from the beginning but it just occurred at the worst possible time ever when the global Covid-19 pandemic hit the world. And in hindsight, it was all downhill from there.

The Board of Directors and its Chairman, in my humble opinion, should have seen this coming as far back as May 2020 and should have applied good corporate governance practices to minimise the loss.

While most of the world’s biggest airline employees were asked to take voluntary unpaid leave and for board directors to take pay cuts in the face of the worst aviation crisis in history – we didn’t.

People are concerned with good corporate governance. Separating the CEO from the Chairman role certainly might have helped to quell this oversight, but we will never know now will we.

But mere good governance was not good enough in this case: it had to be pro-people and proactive. Good governance is putting reliable, honest and responsible people at the centre of the development process from the beginning. Sadly this did not happen.

God Bless Samoa. Lemamea Mathew Mualia