Fiji Times article also covers a discourse on native administration, which was held in University of South Pacific (USP) and the speech circuit rider, Ratu Joni Madraiwiwi addressed the issues of leadership and change in Fiji.
This is the excerpt of Madraiwiwi's speech:
Accept changes: Chief
Friday, July 27, 2007
[Guest speakers, from left, Eci Nabalarua, Dr Wadan Narsey and Ratu Joni Madraiwiwi at the public lecture on organised by the Queen Victoria School Old Boys Association on Wednesday]
Indigenous Fijians should be more broad minded and accept changes, former Vice-President Ratu Joni Madraiwiwi believes.
Answering questions at a public lecture on Challenges facing indigenous leadership at the University of the South Pacific's lower campus on Wednesday night, he said Fijian leaders were reluctant to acknowledge changes happening around them and allow that to dismantle their traditional way of life.
Fijians have a responsibility to invite other communities to participate in a continuing dialogue about the values and the principles which they value, Ratu Joni said.
He said what was most pressing was articulating an inclusive vision for indigenous and non-indigenous people alike.
It must be one that embraces all the communities of this country and in which no one is made to feel they are an afterthought, as in the Fijians and the rest of the others. As the majority, it is not a contest or a competition.
To see it in those terms would be a futile exercise. It is seeking to build on what we have in common, in order to create a concept of nationhood and sovereignty that we can all share in as well as fitfully participate.
Ratu Joni said among Fijians, the economic imperative appears to have engulfed indigenous people to the exclusion of all else. I do not deny its importance and the profound effect it has in shaping the character of Fijian culture. However, I wonder whether we have reflected sufficiently on notions of Fijian identity, he said.
They are inextricably linked to the Fijian language and to the existence and survival of Fijian villages from which our social structure in a large part derives. Rural-urban migration for education and employment is a staple of modernising societies.
Fiji is no different.
Without sustained and creative approaches to reinvigorating both cultural icons, their decline would leave adverse implications for the manner in which Fijians regard themselves. Ratu Joni said the worry was the increasing prospect that a signification portion of Fijians in the villages may be caught in circumstances of poverty and disadvantage and aside from this was the redefining of notions of Fijian identity. Fijians have always responded to firm leadership. There remains a place for that quality in the present day. What is meant is not dictatorial in nature, he said.
Another interesting perspective was from local Economist, Dr. Waden Narsey appeared in Radio Fiji website, a view which the Fiji Times failed to cover.
This is the excerpt of Narsey's remarks:
Warden Narsey Questions the Role of GCC in helping their people
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Economist Dr. Wardan Narsey has questioned the role of the Great Council of Chiefs in helping their people who work overseas and remit money home.
Dr. Narsay told a panel discussion at the USP last night that individual chiefs and provinces may be helping, but not the GCC as an organization.
“Sound, timely guidance and assistance for their people of an opportunity in terms of earning income overseas. This has come up in the last five, six seven years as the largest foreign exchange earner for Fiji. Kind of things security guards, nurses, care givers, seasonal labor schemes and all that. Individual chiefs, individual provinces may be doing all kinds of things. But what has the GCC as an entity been doing about this very, very powerful avenue for improving the living standards of our people.”
Narsey said that remittances offer huge potential for the indigenous people, but the role of the Great Council in this area remains questionable.
“You read the household survey report that is put out by the Bureau of Stats, you will see that this remittance money goes throughout all our provinces, far more money going out there that in fact all, all the loans provide by all our commercial banks despite all their advertisements. So this is a massive area. What has the GCC been doing about this area?”
Other voices are now being raised, questioning the wisdom of the Great Council of Chiefs(GCC) new complex when compared to the poverty in the grassroots. Interesting enough, it took 6 years for Radike Qereqeretabua to speak out; since the GCC complex started under the SDL Government, a party which he was a sympathiser of and also Qereqerenatabua being a frequent invitee to the cocktail party circuit.
A monumental folly of our time
RADIKE QEREQERETABUA
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Work continues at the GCC complex at Draiba near Nasova in Suva
Since the announcement by the ousted government of the approval to construct a $20million meeting venue for the GCC, a couple of years ago, I have been questioning the rationale and the wisdom of such a decision given the comparative disadvantaged position we Fijians find ourselves in today, in general terms.
The TV footage on the GCC complex tour by the PM on Sunday, July 8, has prompted me to voice my thoughts on the matter for what they are worth. The TV item said the complex will be opened later this year, and it will now cost $30million. Yes, $30m. Our chiefs, and top government officials are well aware of the grand expensive buildings that have been built around the country in the last few years for the specific purpose of hosting GCC meetings.
And we, the tax payers, have funded these buildings to the tune of millions of dollars. When this type of decisions are made by our Fijian chiefs, and Fijian-led governments, I wonder whether they are aware, I mean truly aware of the plight of the Fijians.
In the rural areas: The poor dilapidated villages; the hardships that Fijian women have to endure to get their root crops on Friday to the markets; the level of anxiety they suffer late Saturday afternoons when they sit on the hard concrete floors of the markets, faced with the prospect on taking their unsold bags of tavioka, and bundles of dalo back home, or give them away for nothing at close up time.
Hard work, sweat and hopes down the drain. Some of the women I interviewed at the markets travel on horse back for miles with their produce before they can reach rural roads where they can hire a vehicle to bring them to the market.
Most are just so disillusioned and disappointed at the lack of concern for them by Fijian authorities. For us from the outlying islands, life becomes harder and harder with the continuing increase in price of outboard motor fuel, to get us to Suva or Lautoka with our produce without an assured market which can guarantee us a fair profit.
What our disadvantaged rural Fijians need is an effective agency that buys produce from the village rara with hard cash. Our chiefs and Fijian government officials should be made duty bound to provide such an agency.
I say an "effective agency", since the National Marketing Authority had failed for whatever reason, and, I believe the newly formed Agro Marketing Authority (AMA) is failing since it is trying to muscle in on territories successfully serviced by established buyers instead of servicing neglected rural producers who desperately need assured markets.
The benefits of such a scheme are manifold: It should help attract Fijians with idle land to return to their villages to make productive use of them in the knowledge that a reliable agency is going to buy the results of their labour at the end of the day; it will reduce the squatter population in the urban areas thus freeing government (and taxpayers) funds to cater to other legitimate, pressing needs.
But the most important benefit would be in the restoration of self-esteem and national pride values that are fast becoming increasingly lost in Fijians today hence the increasing incidence of assault on persons and property, and the high Fijian prison population today.
In the urban scene, I wonder whether our chiefs and our Fijian government leaders are aware, I mean truly aware of the plight of the thousands of Fijian families that now make up a large portion of Fiji's squatter population. With all our mataqali owned land, Fijians should be the most well off and happiest race in Fiji, yet we are not.
I wonder whether, in deciding to spend $20-$30m on the GCC complex, they are remotely aware of the prevailing poor conditions of Fijian educational institutions in their own tikina and provinces. What educational facilities such as vocational education centres are provided out in the provinces for school drop-outs, to assist them find their feet in this increasingly competitive, and confusing world.
Are primary and secondary schools in the rural areas up to par with urban schools to help curb urban drift, and prepare Fijians for a better tomorrow. Successive Fijian-led governments in the last two decades or more have highlighted the need for Fijians to catch up to, and even emulate the academic successes and high standards reached in general by our Indian brothers and sisters.
We, commoners and ordinary Fijians could perhaps be excused for thinking that all this talk by our chiefs and political leaders for substantive advancement in Fijian education is just pure lip service when concrete evidence shows that while our Indian brothers and sisters establish the University of Fiji, our chiefs and political leaders propose, and agree to the construction of a $30m GCC complex.
Yes, thirty million dollars. The $30m could have gone a long way in improving Fijian educational facilities in the villages and provinces. This $30m of taxpayers funds have gone into the complex, while millions of dollars worth of GCC meeting facilities funded by taxpayers stand idle, or at best grossly underutilised around Fiji.
While Prime Minister, Bainimarama might have been a trifle flippant when he suggested that he "wished he could convert the GCC complex to the RFMF headquarters, but couldn't afford the rent the point he made was abundantly clear, and I agree totally with him the funds could have been better used if applied towards more deserving causes for the enhancement of the Fijian people.
I believe that what the Fijian people deserved, and needed from the GCC and our political leaders was not a monumental building complex that is now being built, but monumental decisions guided by the traditional, inherited wisdom with which our chiefs are supposed to be imbued towards improving the lives of the Fijian people.
And I sincerely believe that had our chiefs and political leaders made such monumental decisions in the past to have brought the Fijian race out of the depth of nonentity most Fijians find themselves in today, in their own land, Fijians wherever they are in the world would have been proud to freely contribute $50m or more towards a truly magnificent monument in honour of the GCC worthy of their true status, without touching a cent of taxpayers funds.
I commend the Prime Minister and the Minister for Fijian Affairs in their efforts to improve the lot of the Fijian people for the sake of all the Fiji Islanders in our nation today and tomorrow.
For that, I wish them all the success.
The only thing generic now in the eyes of the Fijian landowners, is whether criminal charges will be filed through FICAC (the corruption unit) or if any landowners who have been affected by NLTB's abuse, would even consider filing civil suit against these former board members for failing in their fiduiciary duties as well as leveling breach of trust charges, as a representative of the Native Lands Trust Board. This Case Law analysis of other notable cases using "Breach of Trust" involving Solicitor's liability.
The definition according to Lectric Law Library's Lexicon:
BREACH OF TRUST - The wilful misappropriation, by a trustee, of a thing which had been lawfully delivered to him in confidence.
The distinction between larceny and a breach of trust is to be found chiefly in the terms or way in which the thing was taken originally into the party's possession; and the rule seems to be that whenever the article is obtained upon a fair contract, not for a mere temporary purpose or by one who is in the employment of the deliverer, then the subsequent misappropriation is to be considered as an act of breach of trust.
[Above Image:Interim Fijian Affairs Minister announcing the resignation of 3 Native Lands Trust Board (NLTB)board members on Fiji TV.]
The question remains of what liability does NLTB have, since these abuses are no longer allegations but proven according to Court testimony heard in Nukurua Landowners Vs NLTB and the more recent case involving Fulton College. What is ironic is that the Mahogany plantations in Tailevu may have been a catalyst for the 2000 putsch in Fiji, according to a Times Magazine article.
This is an excerpt of the Times article:
TIME PACIFIC
August 20-27, 2001 | NO. 33
With the decimation of tropical rainforests driving up the price of hardwood, Fiji's mahogany plantations are more valuable than their British founders ever dreamed. So why can't the cash-strapped nation convert its green wealth into gold?
By ELIZABETH FEIZKAH Naimasimasi
Slicing away leafy obstacles with deft flicks of his cane knife, Kalipate Daunikuco hikes through the forest. Here and there, a pink ribbon nailed to a tree trunk marks the trail, but Daunikuco can do without such hints. After nine years as manager of the Nukurua mahogany plantation, 30 km north of Suva, he knows its tracks and trees as well as most suburbanites know their backyard. He's climbed fissured gray trunks to collect seed pods; carefully removed the winged brown seeds; weeded around saplings until they can fend for themselves, and scrutinized his charges for pests and disease.
Daunikuco says he likes it in the cool, dim forest, where the only sounds are the soft rustling of leaves and the whooping and trilling of birds. But he longs for the sound of chainsaws. The trees are ready to be felled, he says. "It's what we have all worked for."
After 30 years of tending, Fiji's 40,000 hectares of mahogany forests have matured into a potential goldmine. The hardwood they contain is worth billions of dollars; harvested sustainably, it could bring in
$40 million a year in perpetuity for the government, which inherited the plantations from the British colonial administration in 1970. Unlocking that bonanza should be as simple as cutting down the trees: all that's needed is an overseas investor with the money for logging equipment and sawmills and the expertise to process and market the hardwood. But two years after cutting was due to begin, Fiji's rich legacy has become a national ulcer, inflamed by greed, ambition and mistrust. And while landowners, bureaucrats and speculators jostle for a piece of the action, the country's 14 mahogany estates remain as quiet as ever.
There's not much bustle, either, in the handful of shabby hamlets that dot the road along Nukurua's jungle-clad eastern flank. In Naimasimasi village, three young men chat idly near the dusty co-op store; a squatting woman pokes at her garden plot. In his one-room house, 69-year-old Ratu N.D. Tawakelevu is adjusting the new wick on his kerosene lamp. There is no electricity or phone here, and the only reminder of the consumer culture is the Pepsi sign at the store. But the white-haired chief and his neighbors in this and nearby villages are rich in one thing: the plantation's 7,000 hectares-the floor beneath the vast green carpet that ripples across the adjacent valley-belong to them.
Sitting cross-legged on the grass mat that serves as his lounge suite, Tawakelevu explains that in the 1950s, local clan chiefs leased their unused land to the colonial administrators for 99 years, at "about sixpence an acre a year-now it's about two dollars." (Ninety percent of Fiji is owned by indigenous people, but the land parcels are held by clans, not individuals, and cannot be sold.) At first, says the chief, there was work for the villagers, clearing and planting. After that petered out, they didn't give the forests much thought. They didn't even have to collect the rent-that was done for them by the bureaucrats of the Native Land Trust Board, the state-appointed guardian of indigenous landowners.It's "for our young people," says the one-eyed chief, smoothing his Wesley Mission sulu skirt over his knees. "They should have something for the future."
But in the mid-'90s, says Tawakelevu, "we found out that this mahogany is very valuable." And he and his neighbors resolved to get a share of the treasure.
The idea that landlords are entitled to a stake in their tenants' business enterprises might seem outrageous in the developed world. But in Fiji, where indigenous people's monopoly on land has failed to lift rural dwellers out of poverty, politicians are increasingly sympathetic to any scheme that might help them without the humiliation of handouts. In 1999, when the Labour government began preparing to harvest the mahogany, it embraced that view. "Our approach was that it would be a joint venture," says then Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry, "between the government, the landowners, and the investor."
The only questions were what kind of stake the landowners should have, and who the outside investor would be. But on the last issue, Chaudhry's sober plans collided head-on with the ambitions of George Speight. As chairman of Fiji Hardwood Corp., the state enterprise that runs the mahogany plantations, Speight aggressively promoted the cause of a newly formed American company with no apparent ties to the timber industry. When Chaudhry's government sacked Speight for alleged bribe-taking and picked a British company that was already harvesting Fijian pine, Speight-whose family has a farm near Nukurua plantation-told the mahogany landowners they were being cheated and that, as Ratu Tawakelevu still believes, "the government was trying to harvest the mahogany by itself." The ensuing alarm brought several landowning chiefs to Speight's side when he invaded Parliament and took Chaudhry and his government hostage; three nights later, a group of Speight supporters burned Fiji Hardwood's offices to the ground.
In the lush, church-studded hill country where Nukurua and a cluster of other plantations are located, life today seems peaceful to the point of inertia. But beyond the grazing cattle and the roadside taro stalls, the mahogany issue smolders like a slow fuse. With Chaudhry's government deposed and any harvesting deal on hold pending new elections at the end of this month, the nation's mahogany landowners have split into several groups whose allegiance is being anxiously courted by lawyers, government officials, bureaucrats, would-be investors and powerful chiefs.
Tawakelevu's group, the Mahogany Landowners Association, was the first to move. In March, it signed a deal with a four-month-old Californian company to recover mahogany leases from the government and run the plantations in a joint venture.
At wailevu village, beside idyllic blue Savusavu Bay on Vanua Levu island, Ratu Kinijoji Maivalili is the high chief of 38 clans, many of which own mahogany land. "I have met some people who talk big, in millions and billions," he says. "but when I ask them simple questions [about their business plans], they can't answer them. This indicates to me that they're fly-by-night people."
Caretaker Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase has pleaded with villagers to resist eye-popping offers. "You must not look only at this first harvest," he told the Mahogany Landowners Association in May. "You must consider this treasure a future, a permanent source of income if we do the right thing." But his predecessor Chaudhry fears that wise counsel is no match for greed: "Nobody thinks about sustainability and adding value by processing the timber," he says. "They just look at the trees, do a quick calculation and say, How much can I make out of this? Here we go! And in five years there will be no mahogany left."
It was to save indigenous Fijians from exploitation that the British colonists in the 1940s set up the Native Land Trust Board. Housed in a spruce white building opposite the decaying gray concrete of Suva's government offices, the board is the custodian of all indigenous land in Fiji. It has plans of its own for the mahogany plantations, and they don't include letting village bumpkins run their own show. The board hopes to buy back the leases on all Fiji's plantations and find its own investment partner to cut and market the timber."It's all for the landowners. We are fighting for them," says general manager Maika Qarikau, a prominent supporter of Speight's coup.
The stocky, gray-bearded Qarikau doesn't understand why some groups of landowners "seem to say we are against them." They need the board's protection more than ever, he adds: "With the troubles at the moment, there are a lot of sharks about."
But many landowners would rather swim with sharks than trust their official godfather. In recent years, complaints have multiplied about inefficiency, secretiveness and indifference to landowners' wishes. The way the board distributes income from leased land also grates: after it extracts a 20% administration fee and pays the local chiefs 25% of what remains, ordinary clan members-who could number 60 or more-are often left with a pittance.
Grassroots view of the NLTB
Unlike the land bureaucrats, high chief Maivalili is known for his scrupulous attention to the views of his people. "We are not happy with the way the nltb is running things," he says. "How can we move forward if the official people aren't looking after us? I feel we should do our own negotiations, because these people are sleeping-they are sitting on their backside." Chief Tawakelevu is just as wary of the board's protective hand. "Most of the top chairs, they just want to fill their pockets," he says. "That's why we decided to kick out those people and go with the American company ourselves."
The government and the board can quash any deal the landowners make, but the landowners hold a trump card: they can keep the trees in the ground. "We will just block the road to the plantation," says Tawakelevu with a grin. "Without an agreement with us, nobody will be able to get in to cut the mahogany-unless they have helicopters." But "there must be a peaceful way to solve it," he adds, "so everybody sits down for their piece of cake." Age has made him optimistic. "The Bible says we have three score and ten years," he says. "That gives me one more year. This mahogany will definitely be harvested before I die."
High chief Maivalili isn't in a hurry. "It is a resource," he says. "It can be left out there for 10 years and it will still be there. What would upset me is if people try to exploit it without the landowners." Fijians are proud of their traditional consensus-based culture, in which everyone comes together to talk out problems. But the mahogany issue is so highly charged that getting all parties to agree could take years. Still, any amount of talking is better than violence. And while it goes on, Kalipate Daunikuco will go on planting mahogany.
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