# AS I WAS SAYING…

Six years, 72 months, more than two thousand days. It’s been a long silence but Grubsheet is back. After six years, I am rejoining the national debate in Fiji by relaunching the blog I began writing almost 12 years ago. This first article since the hiatus is unashamedly personal and some may regard it as self-indulgent. It is unquestionably direct because the age we live in demands plain speaking. And it is one of the most critical moments in the nation’s history.

Fiji enters its second half century of Independence in just over eight week’s time – on October 10 2020 – facing unprecedented uncertainty. Through no fault of our own, Fijians are undoubtedly more vulnerable and less secure than at any other period in our lifetimes. Because Covid-19 has suddenly, and without warning, joined the extreme weather events of climate change and the deteriorating health of our oceans as existential threats to the Fijian way of life. Even if, pray God, we largely escape the coronavirus bullet that has so far struck 20-million people worldwide and caused some 740,000 deaths, the collateral damage to our nation and region is immense. The crisis has already caused widespread economic upheaval, job losses and significant personal suffering in Fiji. Yet this may be only the beginning of what will undoubtedly be one of the darkest periods the Fijian people have ever endured.

Even at the height of the successive political upheavals of the past three decades, the tourists still came – fewer in number, of course – but still providing the economic backbone on which the country has come to increasingly depend. All that has changed with the closure of the country’s borders. And for all the talk of a Pacific tourism bubble while Covid infections accelerate around the world, it is still unclear precisely when those visitors will return.

This calls into question the viability of some of our most important assets, including Fiji Airways, the national airline, and multiple hotels and resorts, many of them owned by the Fijian people themselves through the FNPF, the nation’s superannuation fund. With 115,000 workers officially laid off up to last month and counting, it all amounts to hardship on a scale previous generations were spared and will have a deep physical and psychological impact on our own generation and generations of Fijian to come.

There is something singularly cruel about ordinary Fijians having to rely on their meagre retirement savings to survive. Because as things stand, those savings will not be there in their twilight years when they would normally need them most, raising the spectre of an enduring crisis in Fiji long after Covid is either eradicated or suppressed. This is for people who are lucky enough to have retirement savings, of course, because we know there are 60,000 FNPF members with zero balances in their accounts and a great many people with no accounts at all.

Some of these will be covered by continuing social assistance programs. But it was a striking image of things to come when groups of the needy clamoured outside government offices last week, having evidently failed to comply with a requirement to re-register for payments.
These are among the most disadvantaged people in Fiji. So not only did it seem an onerous requirement to them to re-register in the first place but many were left wondering why teams could not have been deployed immediately to assist them with the re-registration process. It is the same with ordinary people being required to sign up for the government’s Covid-19 telephone app. Many Fijians still don’t have proper shoes, let alone smart phones. And for them to be castigated as an embarrassment to Fiji for not having signed up is a sure sign of politicians and bureaucrats who have lost the plot and have little or no idea of how ordinary people live.

What a difference six years can make. As I look back at my last article in September 2014 in the aftermath of Frank Bainimarama’s historic election victory, the overwhelming sentiment is one of optimism. The first genuine democratic election in Fiji history of one vote one value looked set to put an end to not only eight years of authoritarian rule since Bainimarama’s 2006 takeover but 27 years of upheaval since Sitiveni Rabuka’s first coups of 1987.

For most of Bainimarama’s first term – from 2014 to 2018 – the overwhelming national sentiment was also one of optimism, including record economic growth and job creation.
The roads began to be clogged with ubiquitous Toyota Priuses as Fijian families were able to buy a car for the first time. And with healthy wages and money in the bank, many more Fijians began to venture into the rest of the world for the first time, winging their way to the Hong Kong Sevens or to see relatives in Sydney or Auckland on state of the art aircraft operated by the new Fiji Airways – the proudly renamed and vastly expanded national airline.

In many ways, I’ve no doubt that the period of the first Bainimarama FijiFirst government will be seen in retrospect as the golden years – free education, free health care for low income earners, unprecedented investment and job creation, capped by an outpouring of national pride when the Fiji Rugby Sevens team won the nation’s first gold medal at the Rio Olympics. We had our setbacks, of course – Tropical Cyclone Evan in 2012 and then the big one – Cyclone Winston in 2016 that claimed 44 lives and caused damage equal to one third of the nation’s GDP. Yet never before, it seemed, had there been so much national development and prosperity at home. And never before had Fiji’s voice been so respected in the world. Fiji led the fight to save the world’s oceans and presided over COP23, the ongoing negotiations to reduce carbon emissions and keep the average global temperature below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

How long ago it all seems eight weeks before we are all meant to be celebrating the 50th anniversary of Independence. One of my self-appointed roles in government was to try to organise a scenario in which Charles, Prince of Wales, returned to Fiji for the 50th anniversary celebrations and stood in Albert Park half a century to the minute after he had handed us our instruments of Independence on October 10 1970. It would have been a searing image of Fijian history coming full circle and plans were well underway for it to happen. Alas. With Covid-19, pride and buoyancy has been replaced by fear and apprehension. The national mood has darkened and if it is impossible to see the light at the end of the tunnel ahead, it is because there is none. As a British writer sadly observed, all you can see are the lights of a locomotive bearing down on the global economy and especially more vulnerable nations like Fiji.

Government revenue is drying up. Businesses are collapsing, along with the business confidence needed to produce investment. Fiji can only survive by dramatically increasing its debt burden to $8.2 billion, a debt to GDP ratio of 83.4 per cent compared to the 53 per cent the government inherited when it took office in 2006. And it is using that debt, in part, to prop up the civil service, and at least ensure that the public sector supports some level of economic activity as thousands of jobs in the private sector simply vanish. Yet unless the Covid-inspired crisis ends, this level of borrowing and spending will also end and sadly a lot sooner than many of us realise. With the collapse of its tax revenue and no end to the pandemic in sight, the government simply cannot sustain the same level of borrowing. So unless there is a dramatic change in fortune, Fiji – in common with other small nations – has a rendezvous with the grimmest of realities sometime in the coming months. Crunch time in which the lenders say enough and Fiji’s development partners start to make excuses because they too are struggling with their own economies. And are having to remove the cushions that they have been able to give their own citizens that Fiji hasn’t been able to afford and suddenly plunge their voters into relative hardship. It may be the end of development funding as we know it.

It is a time of terrible insecurity, uncertainty and fear. Yet as they look to their political leaders for answers, most Fijians have been left bitterly disappointed. For all the hype of the recent Budget, the absurdly pointless Bula Bubble and repeated attempts to play down the severity of the crisis, there appears to be no plan other than accumulating debt and hoping for the best. The government has been desperately lobbying the Australians and New Zealanders to open a travel bubble with Fiji to put bums on seats on Fiji Airways and bodies in hotel beds. But with Covid-19 raging in Australia and now fresh cases in New Zealand after a 102 day lull, the chances of a Pacific bubble are nil so long as both countries continue to grapple with the crisis. Even before its announcement of new Covid cases last night, New Zealand seemed reluctant to risk a separate bubble with Fiji until some indeterminate time after its election next month and perhaps well into the New Year. The NZ “Realms” – the Cook Islands and Niue – which are officially Covid free rather than Covid contained like Fiji will be the first cabs off the rank and perhaps by a significant margin.

Even a cursory glance at the last visitor arrival figures shows that a bubble with New Zealand is of limited use in kickstarting tourism again and getting Fijian workers back to work. Of the 894,000 visitor arrivals in 2019, 367,000 were Australian followed by New Zealand on 205,000. So it’s the Aussie market that really counts. And even if a bubble with NZ eventuates, arrivals will be nowhere near the level to sustain the current infrastructure and provide enough jobs. Until Australians can travel again – and that may be many months off – there is no real hope of a meaningful revival of Fijian tourism. And even then, it’s an open question whether Aussie holidaymakers – or Kiwis for that matter – will get on planes when the immediate danger passes. Certainly their own governments are keen to keep them at home to support their own tourist operators feeling the pinch of the overall global shutdown.

The constant refrain from government is that Fiji’s economic woes are Covid 19-related but this is simply not the case. Overspending in the government’s last term leading up to the 2018 election had already created a budgetary crisis, which we’ll examine in more detail in the coming weeks. But the fact is that the government had a budget shortfall of around half a billion dollars even before the Covid crisis. It desperately tried to make up some of this shortfall by persuading the FNFP to buy some of the family silver Fijians already own in Energy Fiji Limited (more on that too in later articles). But it was half the amount that the government wanted the FNPF to buy and wasn’t nearly enough to cover the shortfall. So that when the Covid crisis struck in March, it was in the worst possible position to effectively confront the challenge, with little or nothing in reserve to lessen the burden on ordinary Fijians who had lost their jobs and suddenly found themselves without adequate means of support.

With no other course of action open to him, the Attorney General and Minister for Economy, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, prevailed upon the FNPF to open up its coffers and allow Fijians to alleviate their plight by gaining access to their retirement savings. It has been the height of cynicism for him to describe this publicly as government “assistance”. It is their own money, not the direct government assistance being given to Australians or New Zealanders by their governments to weather the crisis. And when it is gone, that’s it. Their retirement savings will be exhausted and they will be well and truly on their own. Ageing, destitute and a crushing burden on their children, whose own savings will have also been depleted.

Yet in the bubble that he has constructed around himself, the AG has come to routinely spin alternative narratives about where the responsibility should lie, utterly bereft of the madua (shame) that he routinely says other people should feel about their own behaviour. It is this glaring lack of respect for the facts and shameless massaging, manipulation and spin that has come to characterise those sections of the government over which the AG has control. And it is accompanied by a marked absence of humility and self-awareness – what his critics in the government describe as veibeci ( looking down on everyone else) and viavialevu ( arrogance and pretention). This is nothing new. In fact, it has been going on for far too long.

As the government’s first term evolved from 2014 to 2018, it began to progressively lose its way. The hubris that generally accompanies political longevity (and the same leadership pair has been in place since 2006) started to intensify and the government began to make fundamental errors of judgment. Instead of the return to democracy in 2014 producing effective cabinet government – with collective decisions being made based on sound advice and consultation – the two-man rule of the dictatorship continued and unfortunately does so to this day.

The Prime Minister, Frank Bainimarama, continues to lead. But he long ago surrendered effective day-to-day control of the government and the ruling party, FijiFirst, to the AG. When I was engaged in 2012 to work on government communications by the Washington-based company, Qorvis, I worked directly to the AG and everything I wrote for the Prime Minister was approved by him. I often wished that the PM would throw away the script and speak from the heart, which he is quite capable of doing effectively and persuasively. But to this day, he almost always sticks to the script written by Qorvis on the AG’s instruction, and it’s something that can make him appear aloof and disconnected, especially in front of iTaukei audiences in the vanua.

I am not supporting the portrayal by his critics of Bainimarama as the AG’s puppet. Far from it. The Prime Minister has always been very much his own man and has ultimate authority in the government and the country. But Aiyaz Sayed -Khaiyum has enjoyed an extraordinary degree of control in Fiji since 2006 and exercises that authority to the fullest. He makes or breaks the careers of people across the whole of government and his influence permeates every aspect of government decision-making, with one notable exception. That exception is foreign affairs, where despite the odd senior diplomatic appointment, the AG has singularly failed to break the influence of a predominantly indigenous establishment.

The AG’s power has been consolidated over the years as he has progressively gained control not only over the government’s legal affairs but over the economy, the civil service, climate change, civil aviation (including Fiji Airways) and communications, including both technical communications and information. Which is where I came in, reporting directly to the AG from September 2012 and becoming the government’s principal communications advisor until I resigned from Qorvis in June 2018.

The AG’s power and influence in most aspects of Fijian life is completely disproportionate to his formal place in the hierarchy. He is de-facto deputy prime minister but Bainimarama has never given him the formal position. Readers of my last article in September 2014 will notice that I floated the idea of the AG having earned the title but it never happened. Similarly in November 2018, the AG’s brother, Riyaz, the CEO of the national broadcaster, FBC, asked me to lobby the Prime Minister to make the AG formally Deputy Prime Minister. But by then, the AG and his brother had just presided over the disastrous FijiFirst campaign that had taken the government to the brink of defeat at Fiji’s second election after the return to democracy and if anything, the prize had slipped further away.

In the weeks and months ahead, I will be giving Grubsheet readers a range of fresh insights into how Fiji really works and aspects of the conduct of government that largely take place well away from public view and scrutiny. I am bound to keep some confidences relating to my work and owe it to many people to keep a great many more. Readers will be disappointed, for instance, if they expect to learn about the internal workings of Qorvis in Fiji. Or the details of some of the hundreds of personal or confidential discussions I have had over the years. But I have come to the view that some of what I know can and should be in the public domain. And especially when none of it will ever see the light of day from a supine media either too intimidated by laws that target individual journalists or too much in the pocket of the government to do a proper job of properly reporting the nation’s affairs. I strongly believe it is in the national interest, especially at this time, for the veil to be lifted on some of the secrecy, obfuscation and spin that accompanies official decision-making in Fiji. And for FijiFirst to finally live up to the promise it made to the Fijian people right from the start to differ from its predecessors and govern in a transparent and accountable manner.

Far from this happening, regrettably, the very opposite has occurred. And the government in mid 2020 is undoubtedly less transparent and accountable than at any other time since the return to parliamentary democracy in September 2014. From the outset, I want to stress that this exercise in disclosure with an appropriate filter is not an act of disloyalty by a disgruntled former insider. Far from it. I continue to support Frank Bainimarama as the one person who I believe is genuinely capable of unifying the country. In my farewell courtesy call on him in June 2018, I told him that whatever the future held, I believed he would enter Fijian history as the one person brave enough to level the playing field and provide equal opportunity for all, irrespective of ethnicity or religious affiliation. It is his abiding legacy and nothing has caused me to change that view. I have also personally held him in high regard, even affection. For all his toughness, he is inherently soft hearted and sentimental. And in my experience, he is quick to forgive in the best Fijian tradition.

Yet having said that, I am among a growing number of people – including members of his own cabinet – who believe the Prime Minister needs to embark as a matter or urgency on fundamental reform of the government to address the changed circumstances of the Covid crisis and the accompanying economic disintegration. And to address the burden of incumbency and voter disillusionment that saw the government taken to the brink of defeat at the last election and that will almost certainly see it swept from office at the next election in 2022. I strongly believe that the Bainimarama legacy – some call it a revolution – of equal rights and opportunities must be preserved. And I have also come to the reluctant conclusion that for all his qualities – including a prodigious capacity for hard work – it is time for the AG to go. He has been privately canvassing the option of leaving for some time to take up a position with the ADB or World Bank and should be encouraged to do so to give the government a clean slate.

For better or worse, the AG has become a lightning rod for dissatisfaction in the country and a dead weight on the government’s electoral prospects in 2022. Rather than growing in the job and in the estimation of the electorate, he is actually shrinking in stature, looks physically depleted and is said to be increasingly isolated and paranoid. He has surrounded himself with people who reinforce his own towering self-belief and has become impervious to proper advice and criticism. And his notoriously thin skin has become a huge political liability for FijiFirst, with the latest evidence of that, his astonishing attack last week on an elderly woman who had the temerity to question him about government policy on a talkback session on the national broadcaster run by his brother. With a withering look recorded by the studio camera and an accusation that the woman was “speaking like a politician”, she was promptly cut off by the compliant presenter. It was an extremely bad look that translated into strong criticism of the AG on social media, even among formerly staunch supporters.

The AG’s modus operandi isn’t genuine consultation and consensus building. He is always the smartest person in the room, with a monopoly on both knowledge and righteousness. And he routinely uses both the dispensing of patronage and the fear of retribution to silence his critics and ensure that those around him are invariably nodding in furious agreement with him or not in the room at all. A genuine democrat, he is not. And the conga line of permanent secretaries who have left – including the PS at the Ministry of Health in the middle of a pandemic – is testament enough to the gross dysfunction at the heart of government.

Scratch the surface in Fiji and you will soon also discover a climate of fear in which even people of standing in the business community and government are extremely cautious about what they say. This has steadily eroded business confidence, not bolstered it, as business figures are obliged to sit through rambling, off the cuff speeches from the AG, admonishing them for their lack of initiative, telling them how to run their own businesses and even more galling for them, lecturing them on their lack of patriotism.

Under the AG’s leadership, some of the most important institutions of state have been weakened or manipulated to the government’s advantage. One of the most striking aspects is the prevailing nepotism that allows his brother to simultaneously run the national broadcaster and play a key role in the FijiFirst election campaign. And for his aunt, Nur Bano Ali, to head the Fiji Chamber of Commerce and effectively act as the sole recognised conduit between the business community and the AG in his twin role as Minister of Economy. Aunty Nur routinely praises the government in the Fijian media without anyone questioning her glaring conflict of interest – something that would raise eyebrows sky high in any other democracy. But by far the worst aspect for me is the creeping acceptance of what would once have been unacceptable and what Frank Bainimarama partly mounted his 2006 takeover to root out – corruption.

Only the very naïve would expect any developing nation like Fiji to be entirely corruption-free. But I was shocked to the core when the AG told me in the closing stages of my participation in government that one of his own cabinet colleagues was corrupt. The defamation laws prevent me from identifying the person in question. But I left this encounter deeply disturbed that while FICAC – the Fiji Independent Commission Against Corruption – is routinely sooled on anyone else suspected of being involved in corrupt behaviour, the same alacrity seemingly doesn’t extend to the AG’s own colleagues.

So the scene is set not only for economic disintegration but the disintegration of public confidence in the government for its declining performance, hypocrisy and double standards of behaviour. A potent recipe indeed for a crushing defeat at the polls in 2022.
Some might argue, “well, why does it matter? Let history take its course”. But the tragedy for Fiji is a divided and ineffective opposition that is patently unfit to govern but will stumble into office unless the FijiFirst government fundamentally changes tack. And that, at least in my own judgment, is not in the national interest at all.

The best course of action, in my view, is for Frank Bainimarama to reassert himself, initiate a sweeping cabinet reshuffle and set a reformed FijiFirst government on a radically new tack. There is a brace of talented ministers in the government whose personal qualities and professional abilities have been eclipsed by the AG’s insistence on control who can readily form the backbone of a reinvigorated front bench, surround themselves with proper advisors and seek the best counsel available both in Fiji and from its friends in the world, who genuinely want to assist. But the change must happen as soon as possible to give a new team time to regroup, implement fresh policies and embark on a less arrogant and more consultative approach to win back the popular vote.

It is not without irony that the opposition leader, Sitiveni Rabuka, gave his arch enemy, Frank Bainimarama, a master class at the last election on how to capture popular sentiment and in the process, gave him the fright of his life. And that is to eschew arrogance, avoid being veibeci or viavia levu and at least give the appearance of being genuinely consultative and humble. Such a posture took Rabuka to the brink of victory in 2018 and can keep FijiFirst in office in 2022. Humility, genuine grassroots engagement plus a carefully crafted blueprint to put Covid-19 behind Fiji and the government and the country back on course.

Next time: Mayday at Fiji Airways.