It was May 1992. I was a young reporter, presenting a nightly TV show called Shell Sports on a Fiji One that was not even one year old. And I had a big problem with the Fiji Rugby Union.
The only person in the whole of Fiji prepared to help me was a woman I had never met before. Her name was Mere Samisoni.
The year before what I didn’t realise would become a love story, at the 1991 Rugby World Cup, Fiji’s adoring rugby fans had expected the national team to surpass what they did in 1987 when Fiji famously pushed eventual finalists France to the brink in a legendary quarter-final.
So giddy was the mood in Fiji that when the FRU started fundraising, the response was exceptionally generous.
That sense of expectation encouraged the government to allow Television New Zealand to set up temporary facilities that could broadcast around Suva and along the Nadi/Lautoka corridor.
Fans were going to be able to see the national team live for the very first time. No more trips to the video shops for those grainy, rented VHS copies. But Fiji’s 1991 RWC performances were a disaster.
The team lost all three pool games and crept back sheepishly to Fiji.
The live TV coverage meant there was no hiding how out-matched Fiji had been. Rugby fans did their best to forget the embarrassment until April 1992 when the FRU’s constitution required an annual general meeting to take place.
Suddenly there was interest in where all that fundraising money had gone to.
All of us in the media received copies of the audited financial report for the 1991 financial year, including the RWC campaign.
My sportsreporting colleagues and I had no idea what to make of page after page of non-current liabilities, retained earnings and depreciations carried forward.
So, I shared the accounts with several good friends who were accountants or finance director-types in Suva.
They were universally appalled at the FRU’s bookkeeping. The details are lost after all these years but the gist of it was that the FRU was accused by my accountant pals of maintaining two separate sets of accounts to disguise the overspend associated with the 1991 tournament.
“So, the FRU is deliberately concealing its losses?” I asked each of my accountant friends individually.
“Yes”, all of them nodded. “It’s disgraceful.” “So, I can interview you on camera about that?”
To a man, they spluttered, “Absolutely no way,” shaking their heads furiously.
“Nobody talks against the FRU.” And that was my big problem back in May 1992. Something bad was being done but it was a financial sleight of hand that most people wouldn’t understand.
It was undermining Fiji rugby but those responsible were going to get away with it because no-one was willing to go on the record.
I didn’t know Mere Samisoni at the time, except by her reputation as a businesswoman and entrepreneur.
But I was a good friend of her oldest son John. I had also met her oldest daughter Selina several times when I was working at FM96 and she used to present a popular beauty tips segment on Natalie Edwards’ midmorning program.
It really frustrated me that I couldn’t find any business types to put themselves forward to be interviewed.
So I thought I would give Mere a call. It felt like my last chance. In what I would later discover was typical of her attitude to life’s obstacles and setbacks, Mere was not in the slightest bit intimidated by any fear of talking against Valekau.
She was fine with being interviewed on camera. She would point to the poverty of her childhood – she was one of eight siblings raised in Levuka by her single-parent mother – as the reason for her iron-like determination to improve her lot and that of her family.
Her mother, also Mere Tuisalalo, was known as Mere Levu, while the daughter – as reflected in the famous Laisa Vulakoro song – went by Mere Lailai. Those early, desperately hard years forced her to grow up fast and also be ready to stand up for herself.
“That’s why I don’t like bullies to this day,” she said in a Fiji Plus interview five years ago. Mere had several causes she was passionate about. One of those closest to heart was the empowerment of the i-Taukei through business.
She understood that part of the reason the iTaukei lacked empowerment was their lack of financial literacy and business analytical skills. That failing had been used again and again to shortchange and frustrate the i-Taukei.
Mere saw that the FRU was cynically expecting to get away with what they were doing precisely because of that same lack of literacy. She feared the game’s predominantly i-Taukei stakeholders simply weren’t going to understand what was being sneaked through, even though it was in plain sight.
And she wasn’t going to have any of that. When the camera started to roll, she gave the leadership of the FRU both barrels, for the way they presented their accounts and how they were shortchanging the national game.
Her passionate on-camera interview with me, and a separate interview with the former FRU chairman Barrie Sweetman – who was equally appalled – gave the program the credibility it so badly needed.
My co-presenter Elia Vesikula and I put together a half-hour program in English, and then a Fijian-language version presented by Elia, that went out immediately afterwards. Did we actually achieve anything?
In many ways the 1992 FRU is still the FRU today, still in the same rather shabby Gordon St office and still beset by the same accusations of financial incompetence. On that score, Elia and I and a young Fiji One didn’t change much.
But the best part of the story was that the FRU’s mismanagement proved to be the start of my relationship with Mere. Without Valekau’s ineptness, she and I may never have met and what followed next could not have happened.
You see, halfway through our interview in Hot Bread Kitchen’s Lami head office, the battery on the camera ran out. (As anyone who has interviewed Mere knows, once she gets going on anything that she’s passionate about, she could easily outrun the charge on several camera batteries.)
While the battery was being changed, Mere rang through to organise some coffee for myself and the cameraman. This was brought into her office by Mere’s youngest daughter Vanessa.
She was very miffed at her mother’s insistence that, despite being HBK’s newlyminted marketing director with a university degree to boot, she was the one being asked by her mother to be the tealady.
That was when I first set eyes on the woman who would become my wife and the mother of four of Mere’s 12 grandchildren. And if you think that’s the only golden thread of the Mere Samisoni story that runs through rugby, you’d be wrong.
The technical expertise that helped to launch Hot Bread Kitchen in 1982 was provided by a Brisbane baker called David Bedgood whose bakery was in the same Western suburbs that the Samisonis lived from 1962 to 1979.
Mere would say that there was more than 200 years’ worth of baking in Bedgood’s family history. But Bedgood was captain of Queensland in the late 1950s and an uncapped reserve for Australia against the British Lions in 1959.
Bedgood’s contribution was to help create in Fiji the in-store oven concept that was commonplace in Australia and which remains one of the signature items of each Hot Bread Kitchen shop.
It was not an area of expertise that either Mere or her late husband Jimione had knowledge of, nor the company’s early investors like Tony Philp Senior, Tiko Eastgate or Joe Antrea.
So how did the paths of Mere Samisoni and David Bedgood actually cross and the germination happen of an idea that would become Hot Bread Kitchen?
Bedgood was the rugby union coach of the Kenmore Bears, one of whose key players was her oldest son John Samisoni.
So from the game of rugby, via the sidelines of the Brisbane club competition, came Hot Bread Kitchen.
And, like the secret mix of Hot Bread Kitchen’s famous cream buns, the recipe for the best part of my life was one part FRU incompetence, one part my mother-in-law’s passion for improving the lot of her fellow i-Taukei and one part her refusal to kowtow or be intimidated.
The ingredients had to be mixed together, all in the correct sequence and proportion.
Which means I guess I have to thank Valekau for the happiest part of my life story. But I am also immensely grateful to the Samisoni family for the part that they have played in mine.
But most especially to Mere, to Granny Fiji, to Dr Mere Tuisalalo Samisoni Naulumatua, the founder and chair of Hot Bread Kitchen and a former Member of Parliament for both the SDL and SODELPA, who passed away last Friday afternoon.
As the saying goes, Mere died young as late as she possibly could at the age of 85.
• Charlie Charters is a former journalist and now lives in the UK. The views expressed are his and not necessarily that of The Fiji Times
