# CORRUPTION, INJUSTICE AND RACISM NOW UNDERPINS THE STATE IN FIJI

A supine and hopelessly-compromised mainstream media means that Biman Prasad has been able to flash broad smiles as he markets his big-spending Budget, with no media attention whatsoever on the elephant in the room – that the Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister is again being formally investigated for corruption.

At the urging of the Ashton-Lewis Commission of Inquiry, the Police CID has taken up the case against Biman Prasad that was throttled when Barbara Malimali was parachuted into FICAC last September to shut down the corruption watchdog’s investigations into the NFP leader and other government ministers. The record shows that the FICAC case against Prasad had actually been concluded and he was about to be charged on the very day that Francis Puleiwai – the then FICAC deputy commissioner – was sidelined and told on the instructions of the Chief Justice, Salesi Temo, that no charges she brought would be heard by any court in Fiji.

Yet nine months later, the allegations against Prasad of failing to declare income to the Elections Office are very much alive. FICAC had concluded that enough evidence existed for him to be charged and put before the courts. But as the Ashton-Lewis COI found, the judicial establishment and a clutch of private lawyers descended on the FICAC offices on September 5, 2024 and shut the whole thing down.

Now, after the COI unmasked the corruption that neutered the corruption watchdog, Biman’s voluminous file containing the evidence that Francis Puleiwai believed would see him convicted is with the police. And they are reported to be liaising with the principal witnesses. But why is Biman Prasad still smiling? The answer goes to the heart of the corruption that is now entrenched at the highest levels of the state.

Put simply, the NFP leader knows that so long as those individuals he is relying on to keep him out of the courts remain steadfast, he will remain untouchable. Why? Because even if the police file on him is sent to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions with enough evidence for a decision to be made to charge him, that’s where it will end.

The substantive DPP, Christopher Pryde – who decided three years ago that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute Biman Prasad for sexually harassing the wife of one of his former candidates and kept him in politics – continues to be sidelined. So the police docket on the alleged false declaration of income will land on the desks of the Acting DPP, Nancy Tikoisuva, and her Deputy, John Rabuku. And they are stooges of Salesi Temo – the Chief Justice who throttled the FICAC investigation and instructed the Chief Registrar, Tomasi Bainivalu, to tell Francis Puleiwai that nothing she put before the courts would be heard.

It has earned all of them adverse findings in the Ashton-Lewis Report, with recommendations of possible charges against Salesi Temo, Tomasi Bainivalu and John Rabuku for perverting the course of justice and a finding that Nancy Tikoisuva was a close friend of Barbara Malimali and therefore compromised in dealing with her officially.

In any other democracy, such recommendations by a judicial commission of inquiry would lead to the suspension of the individuals involved but not in Sitiveni Rabuka‘s Fiji. All of them remain in place to protect Biman Prasad, Manoa Kamikamica and anyone else who has been adversely named and enjoys Rabuka’s protection.

The Prime Minister is like a Mafia Don with total control over the instruments of power through the institutions of state. And right now, Biman Prasad enjoys his protection, which is why Biman grins like a Cheshire cat, having delivered the Don a pre-election Budget that has been well received on the streets despite plunging Fiji further into a morass of debt. Baimaan undoubtedly now thinks Rambo owes him. And all the ducks are now lined up for the Don’s enforcers in the offices of state to make the case against Biman go away, if not at the level of the police then certainly when the file hits the ODPP.

David Ashton-Lewis himself presumably knows it. His Counsel Assisting, Janet Mason, presumably knows it. And as time passes and there is still no sign of their Report being released, let alone acted upon, it must surely be dawning on them that Sitiveni Rabuka lied to the Judge when he told him to identify the “crocodiles in the pond” and bring them to justice. And that the Prime Minister is the biggest crocodile of all.

Why? Because incredibly, given the case against the Chief Justice of alleged obstruction of justice and perjury, Salesi Temo remains at the pinnacle of a judiciary that is being trashed to suit Rabuka’s purposes. He refuses to advise the President, Ratu Naiqama Lalabalavu, to suspend a Chief Justice accused of suborning justice so that the Don’s Mafia operation remains intact.

Justice Ashton-Lewis unwisely recommended that the Prime Minister “consider” advising the President to suspend Salesi Temo instead of a direct recommendation that he be stood aside. OK, says Rabuka. I’ve considered it and decided not to take up your suggestion. And that’s where this now all rests. Fiji has a Chief Justice with a prima facie case of criminal conduct against him because it suits the Prime Minister to keep him there.

As Grubsheet has reported, Temo has two main tasks to perform – deliver the amendment or abolition of the 2013 Constitution and put Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum behind bars for long enough to prevent him from ever returning to politics. (He’s already done it with Frank Bainmarama). Oh, and there’s another task – to protect those who have the Prime Minister’s favour from being prosecuted now that he has sacrificed Barbara Malimali and Graham Leung at the altar of the COI. For the moment, that includes Biman Prasad, at least while his is still of value to the Don as his money man. (The same may not be true of Manoa Kamikamica – Rabuka’s direct political rival – but that’s another story).

So in the nation where happiness finds you, we have corruption and injustice at the top. We also have racism. And of a kind that is now institutional – ingrained in the state – and goes beyond the casual racism now rampant on social media that Sitiveni Rabuka has enabled by countenancing the minorities being treated as vulagi and working to restore the indigenous paramountcy of the 1997 Constitution.

There is no better example than in the Prime Minister’s treatment of the Chief Justice. One of his first acts when he assumed office with the celebrated “power of one” was to suspend the then chief justice, Kamal Kumar, and put him before a Tribunal for alleged misbehaviour. The precise nature of that misbehaviour was never specified but Kumar was stood down and Salesi Temo was installed as Acting Chief Justice (he was confirmed on Christmas Eve 2024, the day after Christopher Pryde was exonerated by a similar tribunal – something inexplicable in itself given that Temo had branded the DPP a “thief” and this was rejected by the Tribunal judges. For Rabuka, bearing false witness appears to be a prerequisite for being CJ).

History records that Kamal Kumar died suddenly on the very morning he was to appear before his own tribunal. Yet whatever the case against him – and in not making it to court, it was never explained – it did not include perjury or obstructing and perverting the course of justice. These are the allegations that the Ashton-Lewis COI has made against Salesi Temo – that the Judge who presides over the judicial system in Fiji has corrupted it.

Yet having seen fit to remove Kamal Kumar, Sitiveni Rabuka is keeping Salesi Temo in place. Why? Apart from the expectation of Temo doing his bidding, there is only one other plausible explanation. Racism. Kumar was Indo-Fijian, Temo is i’Taukei. And there is one rule in Fiji for the iTaukei and another for “Indians” and members of other minorities, especially with a Prime Minister who lied his way into power by saying he would govern for all but who the evidence shows is intent on completing the agenda for indigenous supremacy he began in 1987.

Why does there appear to be so little concern at the top about the mass exodus from Fiji that has taken place over the past two-and-a-half years of Coalition rule -an estimated 110,000 and counting? Even one of Rabuka’s “Uncle Tom’s” – the demonstrably out-of-control Charan Jeath Singh – says Fiji is steadily being “depopulated”.

Those leaving are not only invariably our best and brightest, they form a considerable part of the tax base on which government revenue and public services depend. Are Indo-Fijians leaving because they have given up hope of any equal status in the nation? With the People’s Alliance openly advocating for a return to the 1997 Constitution, of course they are. Because it means the end of the common and equal citizenry and the common identity – everyone “Fijian” – and the resurrection of indigenous paramountcy when we were promised that it would never happen again.

It is an act of collective hara kiri – suicide – on the part of iTaukei supremacists like Rabuka. Because if the national debt under the Don’s money man, Biman Prasad, has now reached $11.7-billion dollars, how do you service that debt and pay for such things as health and education if you are driving a large proportion of your taxpayers out and delivering them into the hands of the tax collectors of Australia and New Zealand? It is madness on an epic scale yet goes largely unremarked in the national debate in Fiji.

Rabuka and his mob don’t have much time for white people either, or at least white people who don’t fawn over them, are seen to be independent or are linked to the Bainimarama era. The extent to which Rabuka and Salesi Temo have gone to keep the DPP, Christopher Pryde, from resuming his position is extraordinary. Pryde was exonerated of the charges of misbehaviour against him last December yet six months later is still to return to Gunu House while still occupying the substantive position of DPP.

As soon as he was cleared of any wrongdoing, the Acting DPP, Nancy Tikoisuva, made fresh allegations of financial misconduct against Pryde from the same file the Judges had rejected. That complaint went simultaneously to her patron, Salesi Temo, as head of the Judicial Services Commission and to her close friend, Barbara Malimali, at FICAC. The evidence suggests they are trumped up charges aimed solely at keeping Christopher Pryde away and keeping Nancy Tikoisuva and John Rabuku at the ODPP to throttle anything that flows from any police investigation with negative consequences for the Coalition, including the investigation into Biman Prasad.

And what’s that evidence? The fact that six months has passed and Salesi Temo still refuses to make a decision whether or not to suspend Christopher Pryde again on Nancy Tikoisuva’s allegations and put him before another tribunal. If there was merit in this complaint, logic dictates that the DPP would have already been suspended. Yet instead, Salesi Temo has, not for the first time, defied his obligation under the Constitution to set up a tribunal to try the allegation of misbehaviour against Christopher Pryde and says the JSC will await the decision by FICAC on Tikoisuva’s complaint before deciding on its next course of action.

Now why would Temo refuse to convene a Tribunal? Could it be that having failed to nail Pryde the first time on the contents of the same file that the Chief Justice knows he can’t rely on three other judges to take part in this stitch-up? We are left to draw our own conclusions.

Nancy Tikoisuva’s complaint about Christopher Pryde to her good friend, Barbara Malimali, has also been sitting at FICAC for six months and counting. What is happening with that complaint? Well now that Barbara Malimali has been sacked – the COI finding she was never legally entitled to hold the job in the first place – that decision rests with the new Acting FICAC Commissioner, Lavi Rokoika. And what she does with Nancy Tikoisuva’s complaint will be the first test of her own independence.

It all amounts to an extraordinary and very disturbing instance of state capture – of Sitiveni Rabuka coming to power with one vote on the floor of the parliament, installing his high chief, Ratu Naiqama Lalabalavu, as President, installing a Chief Justice in the form of Salesi Temo to do his bidding, including jailing his opponents, and Temo using his position as head of the JSC to gain control of the two prosecution arms of the state – the ODPP and FICAC.

“What is Francis doing?” asked Salesi Temo when Francis Puleiwai arrested Barbara Malmali on September 5 and tried to charge Biman Prasad with abuse of office. The more pertinent question is “what is the ruling triumvirate of Rabuka, Lalabalavu and Temo doing?”

Answer: Corrupting the institutions of state, subverting democracy by buying off a large section of the opposition, protecting their supporters, pursing their enemies, routinely abusing their offices and perverting the course of justice.

They are also racists and in the absence of an effective opposition, totally a power unto themselves. And completely unrestrained by a military that has the constitutional power to insist on adherence to the supreme law – and especially equal rights for the minorities – yet refuses to do so.

So the Don of 1987 is still getting his way almost four decades later and Fiji is on a slippery slope to failed institutions and economic decline. But Biman Prasad is still smiling because he has the Don’s protection. For now at least.

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Let there be no doubt about the way racism has been legitimised under the so-called New Order.

Here’s a Facebook posting by Nilesh Lal – the head of Dialogue Fiji.