GD writes: The notion of indigenous Fijians as a monolithic, indivisible racial entity – a people united behind their chiefs – is turned on its head in a startling new article by CommonMan, Grubsheet’s columnist in the vanua, which points to deep divisions among the iTaukei about the conduct of the GCC.
It is startling not only because CommonMan casts the chiefs as thieves who are a “law unto themselves” and are committing “daylight robbery” against grassroots iTaukei. It is also startling because such sentiments are not part of the mainstream national debate and have never appeared in Fiji’s supine mainstream media.
It is a landmark article – insightful and eye-opening – that completely justifies my decision to give CommonMan a column in which to voice grassroots opinion in the vanua behind the anonymity of a pen name that spares him from the possibility of retribution.
Blaming the chiefs for much of the dispossession of iTaukei land, CommonMan directs particular ire at a forebear of the nation’s President, the Tui Cakau, Ratu Naiqama Lalabalavu, who he accuses of selling off land against the interests of his people to “feed his alcoholic habits”.
Many Fijians of all backgrounds might have been unsettled by the President’s speech last week opening the Attorney General’s Conference in which he used his position as Head of State to urge a democratically-elected government to consult unelected hereditary members of the GCC before making changes to land laws. But it transpires that whatever negative reaction the rest of us might have had is nothing compared with the indignation of some, perhaps many, ordinary iTaukei.
Stand by for prised eyes and dropped jaws. Because far from encouraging a sense of unity among the iTaukei – the reason Sitiveni Rabuka justified the GCC being restored after it was abolished by Frank Bainimarama in 2012 – CommonMan provides us with hard evidence that it has opened up fresh and bitter divisions.
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GCC, VANUA, QELE & THE LAND OWNING UNITS
As a member of a land-owning unit (LOU), I read with concern and trepidation the President’s statement at the Attorney General’s Conference that the AG must take care to consult the GCC on all land law reforms.
It’s oxymoronic that the President would urge the AG to adhere to the principles of free, prior, and informed consent as enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, when the same GCC of which he is a member has not done the same for the LOUs and the vanua it claims to represent.
For instance, after its 16-year Bainimarama-imposed exile, one of the main decisions that emerged from its reconvening in Bau was a return to the old system of lease distribution, in which the chiefs took the bulk of the lease monies. In contrast to the FijiFirst party’s equal distribution policy.
Currently, the combined allocation for all the Turaga ni Vanua stands at 15%( Turaga ni Mataqali – 7%, Yavusa 5%, Vanua 3%). Add that to the mandatory TLTB (iTaukei Land Trust Board) deductions of 18% (10% – poundage, 8% – iTaukei Development Facility), it means a third of it is gobbled up by the administrative and vanua bureaucracy, while the majority are left to fight over residual scraps.
No consultation, no consent from the land-owning units, just a straightforward act of pilfering of their coffers, a form of daylight robbery justified with the kind of pomp, ceremony and sense of entitlement that only the chiefs can bestow on themselves.
It runs counter to the decisions of their predecessors in 1876 & 1879, which were enshrined in the Native Lands Ordinance of 1892, which codified the communal system of land ownership. That meant that each land-owning unit is the master of its own land and its final arbiter. Not the GCC.
Moreover, it also endorsed a $200 monthly allowance for all confirmed Turaga ni Yavusa and Mataqali. This, though, was to be taxpayer-funded to the tune of $800 000 a year via the Ministry of iTaukei budgetary allocation.
In addition to that, the first two meetings of the GCC had cost around $500 000 to convene. Maintaining a functioning GCC is clearly going to be a costly exercise.
Interestingly, for all the calls for the decolonisation of our laws, systems and institutions, our academics seem to overwhelmingly support the GCC even as they admit to it being a colonial construct. Instead of being consistent across the board, they postulate the constitutional entrenchment of this colonial body.
The GCC seems to have morphed into an institutional magnet that coalesces academics, technocrats, military elites and politicians trading privileges and benefits in a symbiotic system of patronage. In street speak, it is called “you scratch my back, and I scratch yours”. And it was on full display a week ago.
Personally, I have no issues with the GCC being the driver of socio-cultural and economic change but to date, I see nothing of that sort happening. Very little to nothing has filtered down to the grassroots level, even though it now has full authority over the iTaukei Trust Fund – a sum of $300-million.
For all the grandiose pronouncements about Fijian Holdings Limited towers, million-dollar investments and developments, if nothing reaches the ordinary villager – the farmer, the common man – then it has all been a con job perpetrated on the very people on whose shoulders the chiefs stand.
It is not the first time. Throughout history, the chiefs have always been a law unto themselves, acting for their own benefit.
I find it laughable that the very chiefs who lamented the dispossession of this supposed apex of iTaukei cultural autonomy by Frank Bainimarama are the descendants of the very same chiefs who permanently dispossessed the iTaukei of their lands. All the crown grants and freehold lands that exist now are the result of land sales by the chiefs.
The chief of my province at that time sold 15 parcels of land in my district in 6 months. My own Turaga ni Yavusa/Turaga Mataqali with the then Ka Levu (High Chief of Nadroga) sold about a thousand acres of my clan’s land, all to buy weaponry to extend the Ka Levu‘s domain. The largest plot of land sold was over 2000 acres. Most of these were prime, fertile and perfectly arable lands.
The Tui Cakau was one of the worst, selling off islands in northern Lau and Cakaudrove, flat fertile lands in Taveuni, and along the coast of Vanua Levu, mainly to feed his alcoholic habits. The many prime estates along the coast of Savusavu are some examples of those sales.
The Land Claims Ordinance of 1876, which established the Land Claims Commission, put a stop to any further sales. So, for all the calls for decolonisation, it was the colonial administration that stopped the chiefs from abusing powers they did not traditionally have.
The chiefs have now gone from selling lands to robbing land-owning unit leases.
In this day and age, it is astonishing how a small cabal can claim suzerainty* over all iTaukei lands, stepping all over the rights of each land-owning unit to make decisions on their behalf without consulting them.
A neo-feudal structure is imposed on the iTaukei in the modern-day age of democracy, enlightenment and technological advancement.
On the whole, what the GCC is basically relaying to the iTaukei is the message that each land-owning unit does not have the capacity to look out for its own lands and interests; it needs the GCC to do that for them.
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And finally, a pungent visual comment from CommonMan.
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The GCC is an anachronistic body. You are right about them.
But will this translate into votes against the People’s Alliance?
What is the view of the leader of the opposition on the GCC?
Sitiveni Rabuka is a cancer who has brought back the GCC.
Sad.
Wonderfully insightful article, with thanks Commonman. It is reassuring to get a sense that there are others (not just yourself) who also observe the importance of the protection of native land, not just from international forces, but from the pilfering of Chiefs themselves.
Stories of Chiefs selling land for their own riches, and then just whittling through the money (or rum) rather than building sustainable assets for their people abound throughout Fiji. As you are acutely aware, this is why land ownership and management was set up the way it was, and when all benefited it was a good system. No system is perfect, but this was a beneficial system. It’s sad in Fiji that instead of subsequent governments building on and improving current systems, they want to throw them out and start again – all grandstanding and greed.
It’s even sadder that the current GCC is hiding such greed behind a smokescreen of promotion of first nations culture and lifting the itaukei out of poverty. If they were genuine, they’d leave the government to run political systems, and spend their time developing ways to ensure the itaukei culture was preserved for the next generations. Instead their sneaky mandate will plunge most further behind economically while their bellies expand.
Only in Fiji the chief who impregnates a disabled child becomes a President and a thug who assumes Middle Eastern Man revered as a God told him to do a coup becomes a PM.
These clowns will never progress in life.
Another excellent article by CommonMan, but the question is whether it will lead to any real change. A major problem, as you point out, GD, is Fiji’s supine national media, who are still hungover and grog-doped from their awards night.
CommonMan, GrubSheet, and Fijileaks are doing the job the national media should be doing. Even Alex Furwood has put them to shame on several occasions, including this week, by exposing police involvement in the drug trade, while media were busy preparing for their awards night.
As CommonMan convincingly points out, the chiefs-thieves are preying on their own people and are a “law unto themselves.” They are committing “daylight robbery” against grassroots iTaukei. I don’t suppose the media has the intelligence or the courage to ask the chiefs the right questions. They’re too busy bowing before the chiefs and Rabuka.
As a long-time observer of Fiji, I follow the media closely, and I can’t recall news daily, and the decline in standards is alarming. The media anrw incapable of asking any hard questions about the GCC or the government.
It has taken CommonMan to remind us that the two GCC meetings already held have cost an exorbitant $500k. The Fiji media has no analytical capacity whatsoever, to probe further into the future cost of the GCC in a debt ridden country and do a cost benefit analysis.
CommonMan has raised legitimate concerns about a small cabal claiming suzerainty over all iTaukei lands, and the exploitation produced by this neo-feudal structure — in our so-called democracy and in this supposed age of enlightenment and technological advancement.
And guess what the Fiji Times has on its front page today? A report about one of their own, Anish Chand, winning an award at FAME. Yes — for the Fiji Times, that is apparently the most newsworthy event of the day.
You couldn’t make this shit up, Graham.
Interesting read. However do the grassroots itaukei have it in themselves to turn the tide at the polls or are they just going to let their hatred for the minority populations in Fiji again dictate that they vote with their feet rather than their brain.
All to be seen next year.
When my grandfather was alive, he used to often tell us about the Fijian chiefs.
The NLTB as it was known back then used to give the chiefs the money to be distributed to the villagers and landowners but the chiefs would take all the money and rush off into Nausori town.
For the next few days, the chiefs would book themselves rooms at the Nausori hotel/motel and spend the money on prostitutes and lots of alcohol. Once the money ran out, they would go back to their villages.
The villagers would get a few coins leftover from the “boys trip” and couldn’t question the chief on what had happened to the rest of the funds.
Fast forward to today and you find that this government has just reinstated this behaviour as the villagers will get nothing now that the money has gone back into the hands of these despicable people who call themselves chiefs. Bainamarama was quite right when he confined them to a corner so they could “sit under a tree and drink homebrew” because the truth is the chiefs did nothing for their people.
With the return of the GCC, it is apparent this government is not only choosing to go down the path to divide Fiji by discriminating against ethnic groups; it also chooses to divide the Fijians from their lands that they toiled hard to develop, by reintroducing an archiac form of leadership which was formulated by the British during their rule over Fiji.
And this is the same government the people of Fiji want in power for the next few years?
Interesting reading, CommonMan.
As I understand it, the land tenure system demands the consent of the whole mataqali for decisions. Presumably it was designed to protect their interests from individuals easily corrupted.
We are now living in the 21st century, so it seems reasonable members of the mataqali assert their rights and receive a more even share of the proceeds.
This reform should also be a positive first step towards reducing the handout mentality with individuals taking greater responsibility for their own affairs (and of their immediate family), and a moderation of the communal principle.
The chiefs have a customary role for which a fixed annual sum could be provided, but they must be protected from themselves and lose that often heard moniker ‘great council of thieves’.
So how come the Commonman and others like him do not speak out about the Pedo President and what he did to a special needs child? Is that because he is a high chief and they are showing respect. Hypocrites. Too much hot air and no action.
I have always wondered where the child is as he/she must be more than 10 years old now.
I can’t see why CommonMan is the hypocrite. He has been fearless in calling out bad behaviour on the part of the chiefs.
The genuine hypocrites are the President himself and those like the Prime Minister who have enabled a pedophile and treasonist to become Head of State.
So why isn’t anyone speaking up. I understand there is actually a charge sheet on this case. What happened to it? Someone told me he saw it under Victor Lal’s blog. Why has it been swept under the carpet.
No one seems to have spoken up when the pedo was made Speaker of the House. His own people rejected him at the last election as they did Ro Temumu. So there is discontent but all the hypocrites are silent when it comes to speaking up against chiefs.
I spoke up. Repeatedly.
https://www.grubsheet.com.au/coming-soon-a-racist-misogynist-alleged-pedophile-foisted-in-the-nation-as-head-of-state/
https://www.grubsheet.com.au/rabuka-leads-us-into-the-heart-of-darkness/
https://www.grubsheet.com.au/we-have-been-betrayed-fiji-by-the-very-people-we-elected-to-keep-the-bastards-honest-naiqama-lalabalavu-will-be-the-next-president/
https://www.grubsheet.com.au/the-pedophile-president-takes-office-with-a-grotesque-manipulation-of-the-truth/
https://www.grubsheet.com.au/theres-already-been-another-coup-in-fiji-except-that-it-doesnt-involve-the-military-and-the-fijian-people-arent-yet-aware-of-it/
https://www.grubsheet.com.au/happy-halloween-from-miss-trick-or-treat-and-dracula/
https://www.grubsheet.com.au/exclusive-birds-of-a-feather-flocking-at-state-house/
https://www.grubsheet.com.au/all-hope-for-fiji-is-lost-at-10-00am-on-christmas-eve-2024/
Looking at the micro level again, a 17year old coconut stabbed an Indian woman who had been feeding him and left her for dead in Balata,Tavua.
The hate is real, folks.
As the country prepares for elections, we must remember this truth: preaching about the past or promising a better tomorrow means little without integrity in everyday leadership. Our future depends on leaders—formal and informal—who live the values they expect of others.
Before anyone seeks a role of influence, they must first show the values they speak of are alive in their daily actions .
Only then can leadership be credible and only then is a nation truly respected.
Hate is real part 2.
Four coconuts beat up a hindi boy and leave him naked.
He passes away after a week in Lautoka hospital ICU.
Police silence is deafening. As the honest cop said “violent crime is down this quarter”.
Few realize that the first wave of land alienation in Fiji took place long before the signing of the Deed of Cession in 1874. Chiefs across the archipelago, wielding unchecked authority, sold large tracts of fertile land and entire islands to foreign settlers. The transactions were often made for trivial returns—arms, liquor, or trade goods—and at the expense of their own people, many of whom were forcibly displaced.
It was, paradoxically, the colonial administration that finally halted this plunder. Through the Land Claims Ordinance of 1876, the British established the Land Claims Commission, which examined and nullified dubious pre-Cession sales, declaring that from then on, no native land could ever be sold again. Whatever one’s view of colonialism, this policy set firm boundaries around communal land ownership that even chiefs could not breach.
Yet in modern Fiji, the same feudal instincts are resurfacing under the Coalition Government’s new Kanacea Trust Fund model—a framework sold as a mechanism for “restorative justice,” but which effectively reinstates hereditary privilege.
Under the Kanacea Trust Model, lease revenues from Kanacea Island are distributed as follows:
• 20% to the descendants of the original Tui Cakau, the hereditary chief whose ancestor sold the island and removed the Kanacea people in the first place;
• 30% to the traditional landowners of Kanacea, through their trust representatives—effectively the dispossessed community;
• 10% for provincial and vanua administrative costs under the oversight of government and the iTaukei Land Trust Board (TLTB); and
• 40% reserved as a trust fund investment under the Kanacea Trust for development, training, and future use—administered by a board that includes chiefly appointees.
In short, the descendants of those who caused the original dispossession now legally profit from it again. The government calls it a reconciliation model; but to the ordinary villager, it looks like the same old pyramid—chiefs at the top, bureaucrats in the middle, and the commoners fighting for what’s left at the bottom.
The injustice deepens under qoliqoli laws, where fishing grounds and marine resources are treated as the personal property of the hereditary chief. Even when adjacent land has long been sold or leased to non-iTaukei, the fees, diving permits, and access royalties derived from the qoliqoli go directly to the chief—not the mataqali members whose livelihoods depend on those waters. No villager has legal standing to question how the chief uses those funds.
The Kanacea Trust Model, now being touted as a national blueprint for managing landowner revenue, represents a dangerous precedent. It gives hereditary elites a contractual seat in every major resource transaction—whether for tourism, mining, or conservation—turning customary stewardship into a profit-sharing arrangement weighted toward aristocracy, not equity. The plan is for similar models to be replicated across all land-owning units (LOUs) in Fiji.
In the proposed national rollout, the heads of the three confederacies—Kubuna, Burebasaga, and Tovata—will each receive a share of income streams from major projects under their jurisdictions, even if the resource sits on another chief’s land. The absurdity and irony are striking: these are the same confederacies whose forebears sold off and bartered away the most land during the pre-Cession period. They benefited first from the alienation of native land, and now their descendants stand to benefit again through a legal framework that cuts them into every future transaction.
Rather than decolonization, this is re-feudalization. Instead of empowering land-owning units, the Kanacea Trust Model institutionalizes a hierarchy where wealth from communal land and sea flows upward—to hereditary lines and bureaucratic elites—while the ordinary iTaukei remain spectators to their own dispossession.
The language of reconciliation and “vanua unity” conceals a harsh economic truth: this is the creation of a neo-feudal resource economy, designed to keep chiefs in the center of profit extraction, just as their ancestors once stood at the center of land sales.
Nope.
You really need to check your sources before embarking in public diatribes.
https://www.facebook.com/FijiGovernment/posts/kanacea-island-trust-fundcabinet-has-endorsed-the-revised-disbursement-formula-f/1278628400968021/
As of now, there are also no “qoliqoli laws, where fishing grounds and marine resources are treated as the personal property of the hereditary chief”
Better next time.
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. No wonder the dispossessed seek a little uplift from drugs.
Let the itaukei speak now or forever hold their peace. And it would be good for CommonMan to raise a few points on the President and the girl he forced himself on. I hope he and some others can shed light on this terribly sad case.
I do understand that you stood up for the girl, Graham, and it would be also good if the itaukeispoke about this and that the momentum should increase as this case should be highlighted again and again.
Sorry, missed adding while the CM is not responsible. The following entities in positions of authority failed to aid the victim – police, doctors, child protection NGOs, crisis centers, disability organizations, social welfare department.
Doctors are required by law to report the matter to police.
The system failed. CM cannot right those wrongs.
It’s not right or fair to infer any common citizen must publicly opine on a supposed offense by another party.
Apart from the real possibility of attracting litigation foot libel/defamation libel.
Ultimately, the perpetrator should take personal responsibility.
Nor is the victim going to step forward to relive the trauma being powerless because of the enormous hierarchical clout, influence, and power of the alleged offender.
In this instant, that is not ever going to happen. We know that.
Explosive indeed ! A lethal strike.
To interrogate one’s truth ,to unearth and mirror the hidden
To question one’s chiefs and throw light on their selfishness
is considered Taboo even in this digital age.
He is not just any common man .The first but not the last of his kind .
The worlds are shifting and yes CommonMan ,the academics, local and abroad , not even one comes close to the courage you have displayed so far.
All things change and the itaukei indigenous hierarchy needs to be evaluated by its own people. We on the outside , can only observe and hope for a sustainable socio-cultural resolution.
The cultural matrix of today shows that despite subscribing to the Christian theological Philosophy where all are equal (Chiefs and Commoners), the same people also subscribe to heredity , privilege vs Common folk . Isn’t this a cultural paradox.?
We on the periphery can see, can voice out the injustice being done but to those on the inside , when their own educated class of people prolong this hereditary trope , not interrogating the rot all can see and smell , then it’s a sad era indeed for those who believe in the cosmetics of cultural ethics.
Till when ,will this cultural legacy be passed down before it shatters it’s own people or collapses / implodes because it ceases to become a living force.
CW