# SO NOW WE KNOW HOW THEY ARE GOING TO CHANGE THE CONSTITUTION. BUT THEY STILL WON’T SAY TO WHAT

It takes the Prime Minister’s pet Fiji Times journalist and former media advisor, Cheerieann Wilson, to extract the disclosure that “legal experts are working with State lawyers to finalise the questions that will be presented to the Supreme Court” asking if the Coalition can ignore the 75/75 requirement to change the 2013 Constitution.

Why we haven’t been told this before is ignored altogether. But it is official confirmation that the process is well underway to subvert the constitutional requirement that any change needs a 75 per cent vote of the parliament and a 75 per cent vote of the electorate in a referendum.

This is the Coalition’s idea of transparency – lawyers working in secret behind the scenes to pave the way for Sitiveni Rabuka to get around the supreme law by asking his tame, hand-picked, rogue Chief Justice, Salesi Temo – who has a history of subverting the Constitution – to give him the green light to do so. Make no mistake, Fiji. Stripped to its bare essentials, that is what is happening and there are no two ways about it.

The Prime Minister sugarcoats the entire process by saying that the nation will eventually be consulted about what changes are to be made. But once again, the elephant in the room is whether Rabuka and his Coalition colleagues intend to campaign to end the common and equal citizenry provisions and the common identity that are at the heart of the Constitution and as a third of the nation is concerned, must be defended at all costs.

The sole admission of this secret agenda so far has been from the Deputy Prime Minister, Manoa Kamikamica, who publicly raised the prospect of restoring the provisions of the 1997 Constitution in which the votes of iTaukei had more value than those of the minorities and the rest of us weren’t Fijians but “Fiji Islanders”.

As the record shows, when the Chair of the Electoral Law Reform Commission, Daniel Fatiaki, publicly ruled out abolishing the level playing field the 2013 Constitution gives the minorities for the first time, he was slapped down by Ro Filipe Tuisawau, another senior member of the government and an influential senior chief.

So here’s the thing, Fiji. If you are a member of one of the minority races – Indo-Fijian, Chinese, “Part European”,”European”, kai Solomoni, Rotuman, Banaban or Calathumpian, be afraid, very afraid. Because your equal rights as a citizen are now under direct threat.

Think I’m being alarmist? Well, ask yourself this. Why will no figure of consequence in this government – including the miserable quisling, Biman Prasad – rule out any change to the common and equal citizenry and the common identity?

Why is it that only the Rotuman, Danial Fatiaki, has been willing to go on the public record saying that it isn’t on? And only to be contradicted by Ro Filipe, who is the nephew of Ro Teimumu Kepa, the Roko Tui Dreketi, the leader of one of Fiji’s three indigenous confederacies (Burebasaga) and someone at the apex of the vanua?

All the Prime Minister has to say this: “The minorities have nothing to worry about. We have no intention of ending the common and equal citizenry and the common identity”. But he won’t do it. Which means we are entitled to conclude that they want to remove our constitutional right to be equal to the iTaukei and they want to deprive us of the right to call ourselves Fijians. That’s where we are at, Fiji. And anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves.

Ergo, under no circumstances vote for anyone who refuses to defend the common and equal citizenry and the common identity. That means don’t vote for the People’s Alliance, SODELPA, the NFP and, for the moment, the Unity Party. Because you will be voting to become a second class citizen.

Whether by design or supine acquiescence – in the case of the NFP – they will deprive you of your rights, return Fiji to an effective system of apartheid of the indigenous majority and the rest and destroy all accepted norms of equality that apply in any democracy the world over.

That is what is at stake in the 2026 election. And for the minorities, no other issue is more important.

The constitution provisions the Coalition wants the Supreme Court to declare invalid to enable it to make the changes it wants to the rest of the supreme law.