Sitiveni Rabuka is in all sorts of trouble across a broad front – his “hands up” gesture on the front page of today’s Fiji Times a metaphor for a Prime Minister totally out of his depth and too weak politically to govern effectively.
The economic crisis triggered by events in the Middle East now includes the prospect of power cuts in Fiji and the consumer watchdog reporting that price increases of up to 35 per cent are already the norm. Yet a form of madness has taken hold at the top as the Prime Minister allows himself to be wedged and bullied by Lynda Tabuya into accepting an increase in the national minimum wage from $5 an hour to $8 an hour.
Totally without cabinet approval, the Minister for Information, Environment and Climate Change has joined forces with Felix Anthony of the Fiji Trades Union Congress in describing this as a “living wage” and giving it her public support. But anyone with even the slightest knowledge of economics knows that a $3 an hour increase in the minimum wage when Fiji is already in crisis would be a “death wage”, not a living wage, with the potential to kill off the Fijian economy altogether.
Here’s what one of the nation’s most successful and respected business figures – Marc McElrath, the head of McDonalds – has told his fellow members of the Nadi Chamber of Commerce.
Yet instead of repudiating Lynda Tabuya and sacking her for her appalling breach of cabinet solidarity in siding with the unions against the government, the Prime Minister has willfully left open the possibility of the $8 an hour being implemented.
It is a shocking betrayal of leadership and a sign of just how much the Coalition has lost the plot at the very time when the nation needs firm leadership and discipline. We know that Sitiveni Rabuka has always been in Lynda Tabuya’s thrall. But let’s be very clear about how perceptions of his own leadership are being deliberately destroyed for her own political benefit.
- Tabuya is siding with the unions as a deliberate ploy to increase her own political stocks in advance of the election.
- She knows she is embarrassing her own leader, openly boasting that her stance “could get her sacked from the cabinet” but knowing that the Prime Minister is too weak to do so.
- Tabuya has a history of reckless economic conduct. Who can forget that her astonishing answer to Fiji’s problems was to urge the government to print more money. And then, of course, she led the reckless and destructive decision by the nation’s MPs to award themselves pay increases averaging 138-per cent.
- Now she has abandoned the government, if not in name but through her outrageous conduct in breaking cabinet solidarity and giving Rabuka the two-fingered salute.
- It is rank populism of the worst kind for her own selfish political purposes yet she knows she has the Prime Minister and her fellow ministers over a barrel.
This whole sorry farce must be brought to an end with a public declaration by the PM that an $8 an hour minimum wage would be economic suicide for the nation and political suicide for the government as a whole. But will he do it? Of course not.
The nation has never been under greater threat than we are now but this is a government completely unable to govern, whether it is sensibly managing the economy, fulfilling its promises such as holding the local government elections and coping with the law and order breakdown and the grave threat this now poses to Fiji’s national security.
Another recent front page ought to be sending a shiver through government ranks and the wider community – the prospect of a military takeover if the Coalition can’t arrest the nation’s downward slide, including the drugs crisis which has reached existential levels.
Rumours are rife of active discussions within the RFMF about seizing power under Section 131 of the Constitution, which mandates the military to protect the well-being of every Fijian. If the RFMF Commander, Major General Ro Jone Kalouniwai, is said to be prevaricating, the same is not true of some of those around him. (Assuming, of course, that these reports are accurate).
Yet one thing seems certain. Those who have sounded a warning before and have the ability and the constitutional power to act in extremis aren’t going to allow the nation to fall any further than it has under this government. We are in dangerous waters, with no sign of a breakthrough in the Middle East and the prospect of much more economic hardship and an even further breakdown of law and order.
The Prime Minister urgently needs to take control or face the prospect of losing control. As Lynda Tabuya’s conduct shows, Rabuka’s cabinet is unraveling and any semblance of discipline is giving way to ministers like Tabuya heading for the lifeboats and effectively taunting the Prime Minister to sack her.
It is high time he obliges.
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An important sidebar to this story – another comment by the head of the McDonalds that very much appears to bust open the myth of an absence of jobs for Fijian young people.
According to Marc McElrath, he has plenty of jobs that can’t be filled because young people want to pick and choose their hours and won’t commit to full time employment. Let’s see what the official reaction is to this.
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Madness has well and truly taken hold. It cannot be allowed to continue.
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