Iki Mafi Uele, who graduated as a Doctorate of Accounting on 16 December, becomes the first Pacific lecturer in the Accountancy and Finance Department, at the University of Otago New Zealand Business School (OBS). 

Last year, Iki won the OBS Outstanding Doctoral Student and the Community Engagement Award.

"He is also believed to be OBS’s first Pacific PhD in Accounting," stated the University.

Iki is the son of a fruit farmer and weaver, Mosese and Melaia, from the village of Fakakakai, Ha’apai.

He describes his doctoral thesis topic as “a new call for accounting”, which deals with the importance of public values in his field, and was inspired by the questions he had in his childhood in Tonga.

“This looks at things that are valued by a society. Public values like honesty, accountability, transparency. At the end of the day, what we’re dealing with is numbers. How can we use those numbers to deal with the values that a society or environment worry about,” Iki said.

“We always hear about honesty and people misusing money, and I always questioned in my heart why these people had money and could escape all these penalties, while my family and I had nothing.”

He said his research was a blend of western methodologies and “a contextualised pan-Pacific way of doing research”, which included the use of the Pacific Kakala research framework and e-talanoa methods.

“What I found in Tonga is that western rules, regulations and internal controls are important aspects of accountability, but they alone will not be able to deliver accountability and transparency in the context of the Pacific."

Iki’s academic journey began at Tonga College in 2001, when he became Dux.

In 2006, he graduated from the University of the South Pacific (USP) with a double degree in Accounting, Finance and Mathematics.

He then served as an accounting and mathematics high school teacher and tertiary lecturer in the Pacific region, including in Tonga, Tokelau and Fiji.

A scholarship partially funded by Cambridge University allowed Iki to complete a Masters in Accountancy and Financial Management at La Trobe University in Melbourne in 2016.

He then took an Assistant Lecturer position at USP for Accounting and Finance programmes.

He joined Otago under the University’s Pacific PhD scholarship scheme just before the first COVID-19 nationwide lockdown in 2020.

Iki says the support he received during his PhD from Otago, his wife, the Tongan community and his spiritual brothers and sisters was phenomenal.