The Fijian media may be underplaying the provenance of Sitiveni Rabuka‘s $150,000 “plus” gold Rolex watch but the Labour Party leader and former prime minister, Mahendra Chaudhry, isn’t going to let him off the hook and is pressing home the political advantage of having his opponent hopelessly pinned on the ropes.
The Prime Minister and his supporters believe, as always, that he will simply ride out this scandal in the same way that he rides out all others. But the combination in the public mind of Rolex “bling” and Rabuka’s unexplained wealth – which would see anyone else referred to FICAC and the Fiji Financial Intelligence Unit – is going to haunt him all the way to the next election.
The PM’s sheer insensitivity to the feelings of the Fijian people by flaunting such an ostentatious timepiece when he knows that most of them live below the poverty line has stunned many of his traditional supporters. And the sentiment is growing in the People’s Alliance and the country that Rabuka is both out of touch and an increasing liability.
He thinks he can exercise a “right to remain silent” that he simply doesn’t have as an elected leader who is expected to be transparent and accountable at all times. And for many people, the gold Rolex is destined to become Rabuka’s Waterloo – a symbol of the corruption and decay that is destroying the Coalition’s credibility just when it needs to be electorally competitive.
Mahendra Chaudhry, for one, is going to make sure this doesn’t go away and it is destined to be a feature of Labour’s campaigning all the way to Election Day.
And the Prime Minister’s original statement:
UPDATE SATURDAY AM:
The Labour Party’s statement is evidently too hot to handle for the two main newspapers, neither of which reports it.
Are they worried about the Prime Minister suing about the “corrupt” bit? Perhaps. But we know they are simply not interested in the Rolex saga anyway or they would have reported it in more detail. Or in the case of the Fiji Times, reported it at all.
But while the mainstream media may not be interested, the Fijian people certainly are.
While the two papers ignore Mahendra Chaudhry’s intervention – incredibly the only public comment by any political leader on the Rolex scandal (and that’s what it is, a scandal) – they cannot ignore the letters they are receiving expressing disapproval and disgust.
This from the Fiji Sun:
And in the Fiji Times – the paper owned by “Mac” Patel, the most likely source of the PM’s watch – no news story or analysis (of course) but several letters buried down-paper from page 26.
Rajend Naidu has taken to employing irony in many of his letters without realising that Fijians don’t do irony. His mistake in doing so is demonstrated by the fact that when the Prime Minister’s handmaiden, Cheerieann Wilson, asks him about a Rajend Naidu letter in her Saturday column, it is invariably taken as literal.
So get set next weekend, Fiji, for Cheerieann to say to Prime Minister Bling: “Rajend Naidu says in a letter to us that he is happy that in your twilight years, you are enjoying all the trappings of modern affluence after all the years of sacrifice you have made for the Fijian people”.
And for the Prime Minister to respond: “O vinaka, Rajend. Very much appreciated”.
Needless to say, Grubsheet will not be following Rajend Naidu’s lead in deploying irony as a literary device in these columns. I much prefer this:
Designer underwear? You mean those boxer shorts around his ankles amid the cries of “Labasa!”
Of course, we’re lucky to have Prime Minister Bling. Not. The Fiji Sun doesn’t mention the Rolex scandal but on page 2 carries this:
Pass the sick bag, someone. Quick.
Coups, corruption, incompetence, nepotism, drugs, crooked cops and dodgy politicians; all this from the happiest country on the planet. Beyond what is clearly a horribly naive out of touch decision to flaunt that watch; I’d have more chance of kissing a ducks backside without the feathers tickling my nose than discovering that watch was obtained lawfully.
It saddens me that Fiji is deteriorating into a global laughing stock ; no thanks to an excessively high number of overpaid under-skilled buffoons that have wrestled control of this wonderful country in recent times.
It’s an utter shambles and a national embarrassment to pick up the newspaper on an almost weekly basis to read the latest episode of dumbf**kery coming from people in positions of authority; entrusted by the good people of Fiji to enriched the country & not their personal savings accounts.
What will Fiji be without this prime minister? He must be a very clever guy to still be around 38 years after he went mental and destroyed the country. He is still destroying the country yet the people still think he is a clever guy. The people are the idiots, cleary. Because what has this dickhead done in 38 Years?
If there was One Individual who could be attributed with destroying Fiji, not once but twice – it is Sitiveni Rabuka. The power of One. He was the front man in 1987. He is the front man PM now. What a great job he has done.
Destroyed the lives of people of All races in the past, the present and future prosperity of the younger generations. However – everything mortal has a Date and Time of expiry. Like his Rolex Tick Tok Tic Tok. Should have chosen a Rolex Oyster Perpetual – good virtues that are timeless.
Vitian adds:
Rolex Oyster Perpetual – A relatively value for money timeless Rolex that would have not cost the earth, his prime minister ship in most other civilized countries or required him to sell his soul to his benefactor.
From collecting bottles to collecting watches!
Anything is possible if you are a professional conman who knows how to play the race card.
Rabuka will turn around and claim he bought the fake Rokex watch for $20 from Reject Shop in Sydney
No, he said in his statement that it is worth “$150,000 plus”. Silly me. And to think I reported that it was only worth $150,000. He is clearly miffed about me undervaluing it.
What’s the time, Mr Prime Minister?
*looks at dial through failing eyes before finally remembering he never learned what the hands do. He just likes shiny things he didn’t earn.
Er, it’s coup o clock, wait no, it is half arsed coup?
What is this whole saga of Rabuka’s MPs like Moji bullying MPs openly if they didn’t vote. Where is decency in this parliament!
What a shitshow this country has become.
Rabuka got 50,000 lesser votes than Bai. Let’s be honest. He was in no way the people’s choice.
All Rabuka and his clowns have done is self serve. From running away from FICAC, to unethical practices, to having next to no infrastructure projects undertaken during their time, to no credible plan for overcoming the debt. All talk and no action.
Readers of your considerable output over the years will be surprised that you are showing a hitherto unnoticed interest in demanding Fiji’s PMs explain their sources of wealth. It’s almost as if your journalistic instincts are reviving after so many years of narcoleptically looking the other way.
I don’t remember this anti-corruption crusading being a particular interest of yours, say, in the years 2006 and 2018 when the looting of the Govt was not just limited to the PM and the AG, but their families and wider business interests.
Some of us have not come to the business of castigating PMs for unexplained wealth as late as you have.
The one that particularly rankled with me was the PM and his wife being given by Vodafone return business class travel to watch the 2015 RWC between Fiji and Wales which, with hotels, on ground services, per diems etc. probably cost the telecoms company $60,000.
What the PM did in return is not clear but may reasonably be inferred.
Legal action being threatened in writing by the FRU chairman [his brother in law] against Vodafone, for them to make good on payment of the whole of the $40m over five years that had been contracted, was quietly dropped soon after after his return from the UK.
The CEO, Radro Tabualevu – son of the legendary coach Inoke and a former telecoms executive himself – resigned in protest at being subject to a Bainimarama-Kean-Vodafone shakedown.
Your good friend Victor has all of the details on this on various pages.
Of course Rabuka needs to be metaphorically skewered for the Rolex.
It’s ridiculous to claim ‘Catch Me If You Can’ if you’re leading the country and responsible for setting her standards and moral compass in public life.
And it looks just shameful when put against the text of the Code of Conduct Bill his Govt introduced to Parliament earlier this week. Surely, he will pay a full price.
But wasn’t it good to see Rabuka surrounded by a pack of journalists, hustling him to provide answers to these and other questions? The contrast with your former bosses and the forelock-tugging, taking-the-knee arrangements they expected could not be greater [‘Messiah’ proclaimed the Fiji Sun of the PM in February 2016]?
That must have gladdened your heart; it did mine. Of course, it may cost Rabuka the election. But that media scrum was his achievement, not any other political leader’s.
Although shame on the Fiji Times for covering none of the media scrum, other than in their endless, infernal Letters pages. But then again no one in the Fiji media, not just the FT, reported the sorry truth about Bainimarama being duped by the hucksters behind InstaCharge either.
Are you kidding, Charlie? That media scrum produced nothing in the way of stories about the Rolex scandal. They might have asked a question or two but that was it. It was me who initiated the Rolex story in these columns and then Radio New Zealand and Mahendra Chaudhry who took it to the mainstream, not any Fijian domestic media outlet. So your celebration of the supposedly new-found media freedom under this lot is abject nonsense. They are simpering pussycats who routinely baulk at telling the Fijian people what is really going on let alone get anywhere near the truth.
Once again, you are engaging in a bout of “what-about-ism” – “what about the last lot you worked for and why didn’t you do something?”. I went to Fiji to work for Qorvis because I had long campaigned in these columns for the common and equal citizenry provisions and other things that eventually found their way into the 2013 Constitution. I assisted them to return the country to parliamentary rule, talked the PM into not merely “having a referendum on whether to have an election” but the real thing and helped them win by a landslide in 2014.
I was not the resident anti-corruption watchdog. There were not enough hours in the day for that. The record shows that over time, I became disillusioned with Frank and Aiyaz and no-one did more than me to send them packing. So I cannot be held personally responsible for not having held them and their hangers-on to account for individual acts of alleged or actual misconduct.
Now that I have time on my hands, I call out bad behaviour on all sides as I see it. And I am equally loathed by the FijiFirst gang and the so-called “new order” for having done so, so much so that I cannot return to Fiji without facing arrest and have been warned to stay away by no less a figure than the Fijian High Commissioner to Australia.
At least you are recognising with this comment that the Rolex scandal is a scandal and the Prime Minister has no right to “remain silent”. But to castigate me for ignoring wrongdoing under the last government is a bit rich when I worked so hard for their removal. Given the narrowest of defeats for Frank and Aiyaz, many blame me personally.
It is something I now regret because at least Frank and Aiyaz stood for a level playing field for all citizens and developed a Constitution that far from being all bad, is an entirely appropriate blueprint for the nation given some minor tweaking. I just wish people would actually read it instead of believing the bullshit of its critics.
Yes, Frank and Aiyaz had their failings – major failings – but not their commitment to everyone having the same opportunity to get on, irrespective of ethnicity or religion. And they have been replaced by worse, much worse, because the common and equal citizenry is now under direct threat, corruption has gone to a completely new level and our institutions of state have been compromised so much that it is now doubtful that proper governance can be restored. Hopefully the Ashton-Lewis Commission of Inquiry provides us with some degree of hope.
Many are starting to hanker for Frank and Aiyaz, which is the ultimate vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister of Bling and his enablers and appeasers in the NFP. They should never have left the field of play because it is now clear that their travails in the courts aside, they would have stormed back into power next year having reinvented themselves with a period in opposition. In other words, the way it works in other more genuine and evolved democracies. Alas.
Wow I am so surprised that you continue to tell yourself that Frank and Aiyaz were for a level playing field for all citizens. A complete fiction but a very convenient club to beat people on the head who dared to contradict their power grab: you were racist, ethnonationalist, elitist, neocolonialist, intersectionalist … all the usual student politics ‘isms’ … if you dared deny their truth.
I learnt the word necrocacy last week thanks to the excellent Youtube video on the unreformable Fiji constitution made by Anne Twomey. Her channel is Constitutional Clarion.
She seemed to have understood perfectly the motives behind the way the constitution was rushed into existence on the back of the shameful repudiation of Yash Ghai’s work. Imagine setting fire to his drafts at Govt Printers. Typical of Goon One and Goon Two endless psychodrama hissyfits.
Now Fiji is ruled by dead hands and the supposed level-playing field constitution denies each successive generation the right to update and amend the constitution so that it mirrors their needs.
Charlie, is it you or me who is an expert in spin? What a load of piffle. Here’s why the Yash Ghai draft Constitution was junked. I know the circumstances and have written about them in considerable detail, including this from January 2013.
“It is a deeply flawed document on several fronts and none more so than its failure to establish parliament – the people’s elected representatives – as the supreme and sole authority in the new Fijian democracy that will come into being next year.
Now that it’s been unilaterally released to the world by its principal author, we know that the Draft Constitution provides for 71 elected individuals in the new national Parliament plus another 144 individuals in what’s called the National People’s Assembly, which includes the President, the Prime Minister and cabinet ministers. Its job is to meet once a year to discuss matters of national interest and make recommendations to the parliament.
Strangely, this body gets to choose the President, not the parliament. Seventy two members of the National People’s Assembly are unelected members of “civil society groups” (read NGOs). Then we have the restoration of another group of individuals in the form of the Great Council of Chiefs who are also unelected, though without their previous political power. The GCC was abolished by the Bainimarama Government specifically to transfer power to ordinary people in the vanua and endow them with the lease proceeds that used to go to the chiefs. So you can be certain that it’s none too pleased to see new life being breathed into the notion of inherited privilege.
Yet the overwhelming reason that the Ghai blueprint is causing such consternation in official circles is because it is such a patently flawed formula for achieving genuine democracy. If you dissect its provisions, Fiji would wind up with an elite of non-elected representatives and hereditary chiefs whose numbers would far exceed those directly chosen by the people. And what – pray tell – is democratic about that?
The full article: https://www.grubsheet.com.au/yash-ghai-emotion-before-reason/
And there’s plenty more if you use the grubsheet search engine to find them.
BTW, that article also explains what happened with the so-called “burning of the Ghai draft”. They were some printer’s proofs, not the actual document. And in terms of scale, it was a very small affair, despite the Professor’s tears for the cameras. But, of course, why let the facts get in the way of a good story?
Be it a Rolex or a Timex, neither will be able to prolong your intended tenure as a dictator.
People now see right through you, Rabuka, off course except for those who are immoral leeches and dumb-blind followers.
Your time is up soon!
Rerevaka na Kalou, Mr. Rabuka, Sir.
You have wronged so many people, uprooted families, and destroyed lives. You have milked your position and destroyed our nation as the father of coups. Yet, you have not repented for these sins. Instead, you have continued to scheme, cunningly oppressing more people and betraying the nation and exploiting the nation. I pray for you every day, Sir. Know this: justice will surely be served in the courts of the Lord if not in your lifetime on earth.
As a fellow Christian and a preacher, it is my duty to remind you that your actions—inflicting pain and suffering upon people for personal or political gain—are in direct opposition to God’s will. The Bible is clear on the responsibility of leaders and the consequences of abusing power.
Micah 6:8 reminds us: “He has shown you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” True leadership demands justice, mercy, and humility—qualities that seem lost in your governance.
Proverbs 29:2 warns: “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; but when the wicked rule, the people groan.” Look around you, Sir—our people groan under your leadership.
Isaiah 10:1-3 pronounces woe upon those who govern unjustly: “Woe to those who enact unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people.” Do you believe that God is blind to the injustices you have committed?
God is watching you from a distance, and He is preparing a charge sheet for the remainder of your life and beyond. The time for repentance is now. While you still hold power, acknowledge your wrongs, correct them, and seek forgiveness—not only from God but also from the people you have wronged.
I urge you to reflect deeply on these scriptures and the immense responsibility placed upon leaders. Your power is temporary, but God’s judgment is eternal.
May God bless you, and may He bless and protect our people.