LEADERSHIP is not a title. It is a choice repeatedly tested by responsibility, perseverance and service.
That was one of the central threads running through Leadership Fiji’s Leaders Lounge event, themed “Voices of Leadership” and held at Greenhouse Coworking, Nasese in Suva on Tuesday.
Guests at the event were 2002 Leadership Fiji program cohorts – Minister for Lands and Mineral Resources, Filimoni Vosarogo, permanent secretary for Information Eseta Nadakuitavuki and director and co-founder of Pacific Island Beverages Pte Ltd Rajesh Patel.
The three public figures’ leadership journey started on different roads, but their experiences converged on common universal values and principles.
For Mr Vosarogo, the journey began at home, as the “youngest of seven children”.
He spoke of growing up in an iTaukei family where being the youngest did not mean being served first.
“The youngest child learns that the table is not set for him first. In fact, in most instances, we do the setting on the table. He learns to listen.”
That early lesson would follow him into public life.
“He learns that the vanua does not owe him any place, and he must earn the right to sit.”
The education of character
At Queen Victoria School, Mr Vosarogo learned what he described as his ‘first language of leadership’.
“QVS has taught me the first language of leadership that I understand – discipline without being recognised.”
The lesson was simple but enduring: leadership is often formed when nobody is applauding.
“You rise before dawn. You wear the same uniform as the boy beside you. You discover that character is what you do when the master is not around.”
Mr Vosarogo talked about his career in law and years of working in the public sector where he discovered that “the law was far more complicated than the statute books suggested”.
His work took him around Fiji, prosecuting cases and witnessing the consequences of power without restraint.
“I saw already that the law without mercy leads to cruelty, and mercy without law becomes absolute chaos.”
From his role at ODPP came roles at the Land Transport Authority and later the Legal Aid Commission, where he said, he experienced how legal principles encountered ordinary lives.
It forced a difficult question: whether justice was truly universal, or whether it was reserved for people who looked, spoke or mattered like those dispensing it.
Failure as a teacher
In 2010, Mr Vosarogo opened his own law firm.
It was there that another important part of his leadership education took place: losing.
“I have lost cases …. but those losses were gifts to me.”
His losses taught him that failure, properly understood, could sharpen rather than diminish a leader.
“They taught me the sentence I will give you, young people in this room, do not be afraid to fail. Be afraid of not trying hard your best.”
His private practice placed him alongside unionists, members of Parliament and two prime ministers.
In 2018, he represented a man shortly before an election, arguing for the opportunity for the people – rather than a courtroom timetable – to decide.
But Mr Vosarogo’s point was never about the prominence of the people he represented.
It was about the choices those cases demanded.
“I recite them because each one forced a decision. Will you stand with the person in front of you when it is costly, or will you stand with your own safety?”
Resilience without bitterness
Mr Vosarogo touched on resilience as the power to adapt and grow when facing hard times.
“Resilience is not noise. Resilience is the quiet decision to return to the park, return to the village, to the ministry, after the night has been long gone.”
For a country that has lived through coups, political division and periods of silence, he placed particular responsibility on public servants.
“Resilience for public servants is the refusal to let bitterness become policy.”
It was a warning against allowing yesterday’s wounds to determine tomorrow’s decisions.
His values, Mr Vosarogo said, had remained constant: faith, family, allegiance to Fiji and fairness.
“Because a man who cannot keep faith with his own house will not keep faith with a nation.”
As a father, the family, he said, carried a cost too.
“Every late sitting and every time the government has taken me away from my home is a debt to them. And I try to repay as much as I can. Do not always succeed.”
He said his role was not simply a portfolio but a sacred duty to serve.
“That is why the ministry that I lead and have a technical portfolio over, is a sacred trust to me, and it should be.”
Leadership beyond government
Mr Vosarogo added that leadership was about civic responsibility and participation and started with the simple unnoticed things in life.
“The rubbish at the bus stop is civic,” he said.
So is encouraging a young person to return to the classroom. So is voting. Paying tax. Honouring a lease. Refusing to slander a neighbour online.
“Fiji is not the government’s problem. Fiji is our common home.”
That message was directed particularly at the Leadership Fiji alumni and the Class of 2026.
Mr Vosarogo said Leadership Fiji’s program had taught everyone a language of leadership. The challenge was to take it outside the cohort – into villages, tikina, settlements, streets, schools, organisations and landowning units.
He said, Fiji cannot continue waiting for a single “big man” to solve its biggest problems.
“The big work of the next 25 years will not be done by the big man whose names will appear in any of our gazettes.”
It will be done by teachers who stay, doctors who turn up, farmers who contribute, lawyers who continue to serve and citizens who accept responsibility where they stand.
In ending, Mr Vosarogo reminded the room, Leadership Fiji’s greatest gift was not a network.
“Leadership Fiji’s gift to this nation is not a network. I repeat it. Leadership, Fiji’s gift to this nation is not a network.”
“It is a standard. Compassion, integrity and service.”
Those words carry a challenge for every Leadership Fiji graduate and alumnus, and those thinking of joining in the future.
The program can provide the language. It can provide the relationshipsm and networks. It can open doors.
But leadership only becomes real when the lessons are lived and leave the room.
Mr Vosarogo closed his talk by returning to where he began – as a son of Loa Village in Cakaudrove, a QVS student, a lawyer who had lost and won cases, a husband and father, and a minister conscious that the land he serves will outlast him.
“Fiji needs no more long speeches, Fiji needs more citizens like you who live where they already are standing”
For young leaders, that may be the real assignment – to lead from where they already stand. And to leave something better behind for the children who will inherit Fiji long after today’s leaders have gone.
