Grubsheet is reminded yet again how crazy Fiji has become in the four years of Coalition government by the Prime Minister’s absurd statement that the Ashton-Lewis Commission of Inquiry was worth it because at least people targeted now know they did nothing wrong.
It really is like being down the rabbit hole with Alice (in Lewis Carroll’s Adventures in Wonderland) – millions spent on inquiries that go nowhere because they have been throttled, more millions thrown at media organisations to keep them pliant and a chronic unwillingness to explain a great many elephants in the room.
The Coalition promised the nation transparency but what have we got? As many, if not more, secrets than under FijiFirst. It promised accountability but what have we got? A last minute attempt to push through constitutional change without any attempt at explanation, let alone a proper mandate, after Sitiveni Rabuka bought off much of the opposition in the parliament and does whatever he likes.
Incredibly, while the supreme law stipulates that we must go to an election at or before the beginning of February, we still don’t know whether Rabuka plans to use his power before then to change the constitution and the electoral system to his own advantage. And parties planning to contest the election still don’t know whether it will proceed and on what basis.
It isn’t proper democracy – that’s for sure – and the uncertainty it is all creating is having a negative impact on confidence in Fiji just when we need it most. God help the nation if on top of all its existing challenges – the escalating debt, the drugs, the crime, the brain drain (1000 teachers short in our schools) – nature deals us a cruel hand in the coming cyclone season. A direct hit on major population centres would be a death blow.
These people have no idea about how to govern properly, including the principle of fiscal restraint. Put something away for a rainy day? Forget it. Where’s the money coming from? Who cares?
More loans seem to be announced by the week. And the notion seems to have taken hold that Australia will bankroll any budget shortfall just to keep the Chinese at bay. Maybe they will. But last week’s row about the Albanese government bankrolling the pre-COP meeting in Fiji tells us that Australian taxpayers may not be quite so generous if it gets back to them that Fijians are just accumulating more and more debt in the belief that they will pick up the tab.
Regular readers will know that Grubsheet has been especially hard on the Fijian media for not playing its proper role as watchdog. We keep hearing stories of alarm in senior circles – including the Reserve Bank – about the Coalition’s profligacy – of loosening, not tightening the national belt when the latest news from the Middle East is so dire. There’s a tame economist from one of the banks whose rosy predictions keep getting quoted who ought to be telling it like it is. But that would be telling us something no-one in Fiji seems to want to know.
And then there are the questions that arise that the authorities ignore, hoping they will go away. And sure enough, they do because no-one asks them again. Not the media, the opposition or anyone else for that matter.
Here’s just three of them that ought to be major news but aren’t, presumably because we’re all down the rabbit hole with Siti.
1/ It is now more than three months since the accused drug lord, Jone Vakarisi, was tortured and murdered by the RFMF at the Queen Elizabeth Barracks in Suva. The coconut radio tells us that a certain captain was responsible. Sa dina? Yet as we head towards the fourth month, no-one has been charged.
Why not? It happened at the Camp – a controlled environment. There will have been witnesses. And the RFMF Commander, Major General Ro Jone Kalouniwai, will know precisely who killed Jone Vakarisi. So why the delay?
This was an extrajudicial killing that has tarnished the RFMF and tarnished the Commander himself because he initially lied by saying Vakarisi had died of a preexisting condition when he had been murdered. And it has tarnished Fiji. Justice delayed – goes the old saying – is justice denied. So for God’s sake, get on with it.
2/ The Fiji Sun reported on its front page last week that it had asked Lynda Tabuya, the Prime Minister and the police to comment on the Grubsheet story of the existence of a fresh sex tape of Tabuya – the Minister for Information, Environment and Climate Change – taken by police from the phone of alleged drug dealer Jonathan Hill. What did all three of them say? We still don’t know.
Anywhere else in the world, for there to be total silence on a story of such gravity would be unacceptable. The media and public clamour would be intense. Yet in Fiji, the government gets away with evading the issue altogether.
We are entitled under the circumstance to suspect that avoiding comment on such a serious allegation constitutes tacit confirmation that it is true. Why? Because Lynda Tabuya has form with her sexual antics with Aseri Radrodro in Room 233 and her first pornographic video, which cost her the job of Minister for Women and Social Protection.
And why is this a matter of legitimate public interest? Because the Prime Minister brought Tabuya back into the cabinet after demoting her saying “even sinners deserve a second chance” and if this latest allegation is true, she has rewarded him by sinning again. And all this when Fiji doesn’t need a sinner leading its climate fight in the year of a COP.
3/ The judicial finding of an abuse of process in the Charlie Charters case by FICAC and its Acting Commissioner, Lavi Rokoika, raises serious questions about her haste in dismissing the allegations by ODPP staffer Susana Vuniani of corruption by the ODPP and the Chief Justice in shutting down the Ashton-Lewis Commission of Inquiry.
As we’ve reported when Grubsheet leaked Vuniani’s affidavit sworn on oath in Australia, the former head of the ODPP’s Registry that liaises with the police says she was present at a meeting where the Acting DPP, Nancy Tikoisuva, said police recommendations of prosecutions arising from the CoI were being quashed because of the “embarrassment” it would cause to senior people named by Justice David Ashton-Lewis in his report.
For the Vuniani sworn statement to be summarily dismissed isn’t acceptable. There is something rotten, it seems, not only in the ODPP but FICAC when such a grave allegation is swept aside within a matter of hours. And the stench has only spread with the finding of a probable abuse of process in FICAC’s handling of its case against Charlie Charters. Plus reports that FICAC pursued the ousted DPP, Christopher Pryde, for alleged expenses fraud after its own investigator found no evidence of criminal conduct. Dropping the charges against Pryde hasn’t removed the stench of this either.
None of these issues are being pursued by the mainstream media (or the opposition with any vigour) and they should be. Because it is clear in each of these instances that the Fijian people deserve proper answers – proper transparency and accountability – and they aren’t getting it. Together they tell us that something is very rotten in the state of Fiji and the current government must be brought to account.
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