What do you do when the other small island nations don’t recognise your brilliance and won’t go along with your suggestions? Well, when you are Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, you call up your brother, Riyaz’s, network ( their FBC, not yours), and instruct it to express your displeasure.
FBC News reports that the Chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, Antigua and Barbuda, rejected a proposal on oceans put forward by Fiji at COP26 and “this has not gone down well with Fiji, which says it does not believe this position is in the long-standing collaborative interest of AOSIS”. Which actually means the big slap in the face has not gone down well with Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, an oceans champion at COP.
The FBC News story doesn’t carry the name of the author of the story, which is a requirement for every story under the AG’s media laws. But those rules don’t apply either when the AG orders a version of a story to go to air to try to counter a humiliating setback.
Grubsheet understands that with the Chair of AOSIS “shunning Fiji’s presentation” – which is how even FBC News put it – other island nations have taken Antigua and Barbuda’s lead. Indeed, there are reports that not a single other AOSIS member has sided with the AG, which just compounds his humiliation.
It wasn’t meant to be this way. COP26 was meant to showcase Aiyaz Sayed Khaiyum’s brilliant negotiating skills by putting oceans at the centre of the climate agenda. But Glasgow is not Suva. And the AG is finding out the hard way that just because he wants something doesn’t mean that he will get it.
Maybe he can use his celebrated skills of persuasion to turns things around before it all ends in failure. But let’s hope Captain Mendacious has learned a valuable lesson in one of his first forays onto the global stage. That the leaders of other nations don’t necessarily share his high opinion of himself.
Typical of Aiyarse to whinge nonstop whenever things don’t go his way, and its beautiful to hear how he has miserably failed on the world stage by AOSIS leaders who are alot more intelligent than him. Khaiyum’s little pea-sized brain doesn’t get the message that what he can do and get away with in Fiji can never work elsewhere outside the country.
And even without reading that badly fabricated story by FBC, the damage has already been done with nothing for Khaiyum to save face about.
“And the AG is finding out the hard way that just because he wants something doesn’t mean that he will get it.”
He learned the lesson in February 2016, and that was perhaps the one exception in his political career. Aiyaz failed to change the Fiji flag because Winston badly postponed the final step of the change process until it became almost impossible to take action after the Olympics… Climate change saved the “dated colonial symbols that do not belong to Fiji”, wasn’t it Bainimarama’s words? 😂
The same is happening with global warming. Things will keep getting postponed until it’s too late.
When you look at it with the eyes of a poet, some interesting analogies can actually be drawn. The flag change initiative was (1) unpopular because old is gold, (2) nobody came with a good alternative anyway and (3) ultimately the “smart leader” didn’t have enough courage to impose the “right” choice. The same is happening with all the COPs: (1) the effort demanded to the public is vastly unpopular because coal is gold in too many countries, (2) nobody is proposing concrete alternative measures that will work anyway and (3) consequently no leader can effect the necessary changes because courage is nothing without the intelligence to come with a solution in the first place.
Fail to plan is plan to fail.
Fiji is still a colony waiting for direction from Europe. I really don’t know what we can expect at this point for all small island nations…
Sometimes I look at our flag and I wonder… 🇫🇯🇬🇧 Are we a third-world or a quarter-world country now? How more insignificant have we become since Cop-23 in Bonn, 🇩🇪?
Blue is what will be left when our islands drown. There you have our new and final flag… 🟦