The Fiji Council of Social Services (FCOSS) has warned that the nation needs to prepare itself to face more children being in conflict with the law.

Chief executive officer Vani Catanasiga highlighted this while responding to Attorney-General Siromi Turaga’s revelation at the Lomaiviti Provincial Council meeting last week that schoolchildren were being used to peddle the highly addictive illegal drug methamphetamine, commonly known as “ice”.

She said a concerted and coordinated approach was needed to tackle this issue.

If the issue was not resolved, there could be a drop in education attainment rates and pressure on national social services systems, she added.

Methodist Church in Fiji and Rotuma president Reverend Ili Vunisuwai said poverty was the root cause of the problem.

He said the issue was serious and the government, church and vanua should come together to solve the issue.

Rakesh Kumar is a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.

“The people of Fiji don’t deserve to go through another coup.”

This was the view shared by Fiji Navy commander Captain Humphrey Tawake while speaking to The Fiji Times during the Fiji Navy Day celebrations at Stanley Brown Naval Base in Walu Bay, Suva, this week.

“Fiji, as a nation doesn’t need another coup,” said Tawake, who is also deputy RFMF commander of the Republic of Fiji Military Forces (RFMF).

• READ MORE: Other Fiji coups reports

“The RFMF commander has made his stance and we will abide by that.

“We will abide by the rule of law, there will be no more coups.

“We will respect the democratic process that has taken place and we must be mindful that we all have a role to play.”

Captain Tawake said at the event on Thursday that people or institutions should stop using the RFMF for their personal or political agenda.

‘Steadfast’ over rule of law
“RFMF is a professional institution and we stand steadfast to the rule of law and democracy.

“I stand by the RFMF commander, and I want to reiterate that again.”

RFMF commander Major-General Ro Jone Kalouniwai said last week he had made it clear during the Commander’s Parade earlier this month that the constitutional process must be followed.

He said they would continue to abide by the rule of law and order and continue to respect the decision of the people for voting in this particular government — the ruling coalition of Sitiveni Rabuka, who is both a former coup leader and prime minister.

Meanwhile, he said Thursday’s event was about commemorating 48 years of existence and the institution’s humble beginning in 1975.

Arieta Vakasukawaqa is a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.

It has been six months now, but I have to make a strange admission. I miss the laughs I used to get over the pseudo-authoritative pronouncements of Fiji’s former attorney-general Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum (pictured).

I recall that he got a bit over-excited in January this year. That was when he decided to lecture the new government on “constitutionalism” and “rule of law”.

This was apparently without any reflection on how he and his FijiFirst party government had performed by the rule of law standards on which he was pontificating.

• READ MORE: Other Richard Naidu columns

But in the last few days he decided to debate Deputy Prime Minister Manoa Kamikamica on the FijiFirst party’s 2022 financial accounts, apparently insisting that FFP was not insolvent.

This was never going to be an equal contest. Kamikamica is a chartered accountant. Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, well — he isn’t.

You don’t need to be an accountant to read a balance sheet — or to understand the simple definition of insolvency.

It’s not hard. You are insolvent if you “cannot pay your debts as they fall due”. You can find the accounts of all the main political parties on the Fiji Elections Office website.

More cash than others
FFP’s balance sheet (see image) says it has cash and term deposits of more than $270,000 in the bank.

That’s pretty good. It’s actually more cash than all the other political parties combined. But FFP also has debts (called, in accountant-speak, “payables and accruals”).

These come to well over $1.6 million. Once you add and subtract all the smaller stuff, FFP is left with net liabilities of just over $1 million.

In other words, that’s $1 million that FFP, even if it sold everything it owns, still could not pay to its creditors.

That $1.6 million in debts “fell due” months ago. And FFP could not pay them as they fell due. So FFP is insolvent.

Why pretend otherwise? Luckily for FFP, there isn’t a simple legal way for a creditor to wind up a political party for not paying its debts. Presumably FFP’s unpaid suppliers have learned that bitter lesson a bit late.

Learning lessons
But we are all learning lessons about FFP. Six months ago it was all-powerful. Its leaders sat in taxpayer-funded government offices and did (pretty much) whatever they wanted.

They regularly lectured the rest of us on all of our failings and all the things we were doing wrong. They exuded competence. Fast forward to June 2023.

The same FFP — which previously ran a government that spends $4 billion a year — had been suspended because it couldn’t prepare its own accounts on time.

The deadline for submitting political party accounts is March 31 each year. That’s in the Political Parties Act. Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum presumably knew that because, after all, he “wrote the law”.

FFP’s accounts were not submitted by March 31. The Acting Supervisor of Elections (in stark contrast to her predecessor) did not fire off a suspension letter one day later.

She gave FFP (and some other political parties) an extension of time to put in their accounts. Six weeks later, FFP still had not filed its accounts.

And at that point even the most reasonable supervisor is entitled to be annoyed. That was when the suspension letter went out. Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum’s reaction at the time was the usual legalistic bluster unsupported by the facts. FijiFirst, he said, had not been afforded “due process and natural justice”.

Failed to meet deadline
He did not elaborate. And what could he say? His party had been given a six-week extension of time and still not met the deadline under the law he had himself drafted. And then we found out.

FFP was deeply in debt — and presumably too embarrassed to tell the rest of us. If it hadn’t been suspended, we would probably still not know.

What else can we learn from the accounts of the former ruling party? We can see from its balance sheet that it began 2022 with (cash and term deposits) more than $860,000 in the bank.

That’s the sort of money other politicians could only dream of. At that time the People’s Alliance and National Federation Party, between them, had less than $20,000.

However FijiFirst then went on to spend $4.2 million — or more accurately, it ran up debts of that amount, and now it has to find $1.6m to pay off those debts.

That is because FFP raised only $2.2 million in donations. I say “only” — but that $2.2 million was twice as much as the three parties now in government could collect.

More lessons
There are other, bigger, lessons to learn from all of this — lessons about money and politics. What was FFP thinking as it threw around the cash in the 2022 election campaign?

Who would spend $1.6 million they didn’t have? The answer — a party that thought that, as long as it could win, the cash would keep rolling in.

No political party in Fiji’s history has ever had millions of dollars to spend.

And no political party in Fiji has ever cashed in on its political power as cynically as FFP did in the past 10 years. It was FFP that made the laws on electoral funding for political parties.

Companies were not allowed to contribute — only individuals and only up to $10,000 each. All donors had to be publicly disclosed — this included someone who put $2 in a bucket during a soli.

SODELPA leader Viliame Gavoka famously commented on how the laws required his party to issue a receipt for selling a $1 roti parcel. FFP of course, did not have to bother with the small stuff.

Soli? Roti parcels? Why bother when you can just wait for the $10,000 cheques? And the cheques rolled in — with embarrassing enthusiasm.

Early donor lists
Many of us saw the early FFP donor lists when they were published. Prominent business families fell over themselves to write their $10,000 cheques.

Of course, these cheques were from “individuals”. Those individuals were company directors, their spouses and even their under-age children, even if those children (and probably some of the spouses) didn’t have bank accounts to write cheques from.

You would hear from other, less enthusiastic, business people about invitations to FFP fund-raisers. You went — and you took your chequebook with you — because if you didn’t, well…

One business man complained to me: “If I pay, I get to talk to them — but they don’t do anything about my business problems anyway.”

Fiji is not the first country to encounter unhealthy problems about money and politics.

These create challenges in every democracy. In Fiji’s so-called “true democracy”, the rules about who donated money were supposed to be transparent.

The Political Parties Act originally required the Supervisor of Elections to publish the names of people who donated to political parties. But as FFP’s donors squirmed with discomfort under the spotlight of social media, in 2021 FFP quietly changed the law — buried, of course, in one of those Bills that would be rushed to Parliament on two days’ notice and rushed through the infamous Standing Order 51.

The law change meant that those party donor lists still had to be disclosed to the Supervisor of Elections — but the Supervisor no longer had to publish them in the newspapers.

Climate of political fear
Of course, in the climate of political fear that FFP actively promoted, that created a separate problem.

The ruling party always collects the millions. But the opposition parties would have to work much harder to collect their cash because no one with any serious money wanted to be identified on those disclosure lists as giving money to the opposition.

Because, even though the Supervisor of Elections no longer had to publish those lists, any member of the public could still inspect them.

Most Fiji citizens might not know that. But the one person who would know that was the general secretary of FFP — also the minister for elections, attorney-general and minister for economy.

Now, however, for the first time since 2014, we can do something about our money-and-politics laws.

Those laws need to be reviewed, with a strong eye on the lessons of the past.

But the most critical lesson is probably not about those laws. It is about the climate of fear that enabled one political party to raise millions of dollars to keep itself in power while keeping all of its opponents out of cash.

Some good news?
Finally, for diehard FijiFirst supporters — a small spot of good news in those accounts. Apparently FFP still has 6120 “promotional sulu” in stock.

The sulu, according to the accounts (Note 11), have been “fully expensed”. This is because “realisable value cannot be determined with reasonable accuracy.” This is the way accountants say: “We don’t think anybody wants them so we can’t put any value to them.”

Perhaps to show their loyalty, FFP’s fans could buy the sulu to pay off the $1.6 million debt. This would cost only $270 per sulu. Just thought I’d try to help.

Richard Naidu is a Suva lawyer who writes a regular independent column for The Fiji Times. He has enough sulu. He is also the chair of the Coalition government’s Fiscal Review Committee. Republished with permission.

Five weeks on from Christmas Eve, I think most of us are still a bit stunned at what has happened in Fiji.

A new government came to power in dramatic circumstances.

It took not one but two Sodelpa management board meetings to change it, with razor-thin margins.

• READ MORE: Other Richard Naidu articles on Fiji

The same drama extended into Parliament.

There was definitely a bump in the road when the military openly expressed concern about the speed of change.

But that was navigated smoothly.

One other thing stood on a razor-thin margin.

Nobody in Fiji should forget it.

‘Rule of law’
A little thing called “rule of law”.

In a Fiji Times column last week, I tried to capture the idea of this.

First, the idea that the law is more important than everyone, including the government.

But second, the idea that the law is more than just rules and regulations which restrict us.

Rule of law means also that the government is bound to respect ordinary people’s rights and freedoms.

That rule of law was seriously at risk under the FijiFirst government.

Things had gotten to the point where, using bullying and fear, unafraid of the courts or any other institution which might restrain it, the FijiFirst government just did what it wanted.

In its last year of power, the only restraint on FijiFirst was the fact that an election was coming.

Turned on opponents
Had it won that election, FijiFirst would have turned its guns on the only opponents it had left — the opposition political parties, the independent news media and the few non-government organisations that continued to criticise it.

Fiji would have fallen firmly into that growing group of countries now called “democratic dictatorships” — places which have elections and the other trappings of democracy, but which in truth severely restrict the democratic rights and freedoms of their people.

Four key officials holding important constitutional positions — the Chief Justice, the Commissioner of Police, the Commissioner of Corrections and the Supervisor of Elections — have been suspended inside of four weeks.

That tells us one of two things.

Either the new government is particularly vengeful.

Or there are complaints against these officials that date back to the FijiFirst party’s time in power and which are only now coming to light.

After all, they’ve hardly had time to offend us under the new government.

And if these are in fact complaints about things which happened long ago, we must ask — why were they not actioned under the FijiFirst government?

No one dared complain
Or was fear of the government so pervasive that no one dared to complain against these officials — and the complaints are only being made now?

We need to know about these complaints.

Yes, each of these officials is innocent until proven otherwise.

But they are public officials, occupying some of the most powerful and critical positions in the country.

The decisions they make concern our most basic rights and freedoms — whether or not we spend a night in a cell, whether (and when) we will get a ruling on our employment dispute, or whether we are able to vote.

So we, the public, have a right to know what they are accused of.

What has changed?

The overwhelming sentiment for most of us — at least those around me — is a new sense of freedom.

Doesn’t change things
For many of us, that does not really change things from day to day.

Not everyone has the compelling urge to air their opinions on everything (in newspaper columns or elsewhere).

But it is simply the fact that if you want to rant about something on Facebook, you’re not worrying about what the government will think.

Most of us, day to day, are not worrying about whether we will be unfairly held for 48 hours in a jail cell.

Yet only two years ago in the covid crisis, the police were doing that to hundreds of people.

We are not worrying about whether we will be arrested for saying something which will “cause public alarm”.

Yet, every time an NGO or opposition political party leader issued a public statement in the last 10 years, this was a constant worry.

But much of the real damage done was at the next level down — the level where ordinary people like us want to get things done.

This week I met a small group of distinguished doctors.

Climate of fear
I heard with some amazement about the climate of fear which predominated in the Ministry of Health.

Criticism was not permitted.

In November last year, the permanent Secretary for Health publicly told politicians to “leave the Health Ministry alone”.

Nobody, he said, should talk about it.

Nobody should “undermine” it — because it was on the cusp of great things.

One senior medical specialist who famously criticised the state of our hospitals in The Fiji Times was immediately banned from entering them.

This was hardly a hardship — he was only volunteering his skills for free.

But what about all the patients who he was looking after?

He recounted to me, with some wonder the bureaucratic memo-writing process that is now being followed to bring him back.

Cash and volunteers
The International Women’s Association has cash and volunteers ready to improve women’s and children’s health at CWM Hospital.

We are talking about basic things, like hot water and decrepit bathrooms.

How do you run hospital wards without hot water?

IWA’s mistake was to make these deficiencies public on social media.

So the Health Ministry stopped talking to IWA.

Only with the change of government is IWA allowed to openly communicate with the Ministry of Health about what it wants to do — instead of whispers to officials on their gmail accounts.

For years, I have marvelled at the stupidity of the edicts issued from Ministry of Education headquarters.

Schools may not fund-raise without permission.

Schools may not invite speakers to their school assemblies without permission.

Schools may not run extracurricular classes for students without their permission.

‘In name of equality’
The policy seems to be “in the name of equality, we must all be equally dumbed down”.

As the Education Ministry pursued the government’s mad obsession with our “secular state”, schools owned by religious bodies cannot choose their own school heads, even if they pay for them and save the government money.

Education and health are critical issues for all of us.

The government can’t deliver everything.

Governments by nature are unwieldy, bureaucratic and slow (sometimes for good reason, because they have to carefully manage public funds and follow other laws).

So people have to get involved.

Get involved

We also have to get involved on a wide swathe of other issues such as poverty, domestic violence, drug abuse, crime and economic opportunities.

Criticism not welcome
These are all things which, for the past 15 years, we were told, the government had under control — like “never before”.

Our input — and certainly our criticism — were not welcome.

Let’s be clear about our new government.

We might be glad that it’s there.

And we should never take for granted the rights and freedoms it has restored to us and the refreshing new attitude it brings after 15 years.

But soon the honeymoon will end, the shine will come off and we will all have to get down to the work (which never ends) of solving our deep social and economic problems.

The expectations on the new government are huge.

Everybody wants every problem to be solved and every complaint to be answered.

We want every crook who has received an unfair benefit to be (as we now always seem to say) “taken to task”.

Same huge debt
The new government has the same huge debt, the same shortage of cash and the same lack of resources the old government did.

It can move some money around and change some priorities — but it can never solve every problem.

But a government that is prepared to tolerate criticism has at least one advantage over one that is not.

It can hear from real people about where the real problems are.

That’s why freedom of expression is not just a nice thing to have.

It’s actually important to tell us what is going on.

This government, like the old one, will gradually become more complacent and unresponsive as it becomes burdened with the ordinary business of administration.

And that is why every democracy — at least every real one — prizes freedom.

Freedom to march
Freedom for people to criticise, to march in the street, to take the government to court, without being punished for it.

These are some of the tools we use to hold the government to account, to remind the politicians that it is about us, not them, and to embarrass the politicians into action.

But just as important is the responsibility on us not just to talk — but also to act.

Our new freedom also means freedom to get involved.

What are the things that are important to us?

Is it health?

Education?

Child poverty?

Prison reform?

Our local environment?

So what will we do?

Don’t take it for granted
We don’t need to be part of some official committee or NGO to fight for the things that are important to us.

We don’t need the government’s permission to hold a public forum to talk about problems and solutions.

After 15 years we need to be able to say to our leaders: “We’re in charge here. This is what we want. You work for us.”

They won’t always listen — but that’s what freedom is.

It was a close-run thing on Christmas Eve — but freedom is what we got.

So let’s not take it for granted.

Let’s use it.

Richard Naidu is a Suva lawyer who is fairly free with his opinions. The views in this article are not necessarily the views of The Fiji Times. Republished with permission.