A quiet, devastating execution is taking place across Fiji today, driven by an education system that functions as a factory of cultural erasure.
While politicians spin glossy narratives of modern advancement, our foundational identity is systematically processed out of our children. This crisis goes far beyond the survival of casual street slang; we are witnessing the structural death of written vernacular literacy.
The institutional obsession with forcing “English-everything” has created a hollow society where children are linguistically blind to their own heritage.
This critical analysis tears away the sanitised, bureaucratic lies of the Ministry of Education. By examining the tragic warnings of our paramount chiefs (FT 03/07/26) and the systemic hypocrisy of state institutions, we expose an unfolding cultural emergency threatening to break the back of our sovereignty forever.
The supreme parliament shame
The ultimate proof of this cultural self-sabotage sits at the apex of our democracy. It is a profound, shameful indictment that citizens and elected leaders are restricted from speaking their mother tongues inside national Parliament.
When the highest house decrees that indigenous iTaukei and Fiji Hindi are unfit for state debate, it sends a toxic message to every schoolyard. We have built a system that criminalises native speech at the highest level of governance. This colonial inferiority complex creates a top-down mandate for erasure, instructing children that ancestral scripts have no place in intellectual or political life.
My bitter personal confession
Let us break through the polite academic facade and address the raw truth of this linguistic processing. I hold a PhD, I am a seasoned scientist, and I write national columns in English. I speak Fiji Hindi with fluid, natural ease every single day. Yet, I confess with deep, burning anger that I cannot read or write formal Hindi script with authentic literacy. Why?
Because the school factories of my youth actively beat our vernacular out of us, brainwashing us to believe English was the sole marker of intelligence.
My generation was linguistically fractured by design. Today, the exact same tragedy plays out across Fiji at a far more accelerated, catastrophic pace.
This structural failure robs us of internal intellectual depth, rendering highly educated citizens completely illiterate within their ancestral domains and spiritual heritages.
Chiefs break the silence
The Great Council of Chiefs has shattered the state’s comfortable silence on this national emergency. Chairman Ratu Viliame Seruvakula recently exposed the terrifying reality confronting our young iTaukei generation (FT 03/07/26).
He laid bare a damning paradox: our children can navigate complex English texts and Western Bibles with ease, yet they are completely illiterate when handed a formal iTaukei Bible or document.
The GCC’s urgent proposal to make vernacular language education strictly compulsory across schools is a desperate cry for cultural survival. When children lose the ability to read and write their mother tongue, the ancestral chain snaps, severing them permanently from their history, land, and identity.
Betrayal of past decrees
This current linguistic rot is not an accident; it is a deliberate, state-inflicted betrayal. During the Bainimarama administration, an explicit, legally binding national decree mandated that every primary school must teach conversational iTaukei and Fiji Hindi to all students.
The objective was profound: break down racial silos, foster deep multicultural integration, and guarantee basic linguistic respect for all communities. It was a progressive vision for a unified Fiji. What happened to it?
The Ministry of Education quietly starved the mandate of oxygen. They refused to recruit teachers, starved classrooms of resources, and allowed a vital national law enshrined in the 2013 Constitution to rot into a useless piece of paper.
The English only mandate
Step inside any modern Fijian classroom today and you will see the factory of erasure operating at full capacity. Vernacular languages have been utterly marginalised, treated as embarrassing, secondary burdens.
English completely dominates every single assessment, textbook, and metric of academic success. School administrations openly enforce strict English-only zones, treating our beautiful native tongues like primitive dialects that belong in the gutter.
There is a total, systemic absence of modern vernacular learning materials and zero institutional accountability. We are actively instructing our children that the speech of their noble ancestors holds no intellectual currency, funding our own cultural annihilation with our tax dollars.
Indictment of political leadership
Where is the Minister for Education while our cultural house burns to the ground? The ongoing institutional paralysis within the ministry is a shameful indictment of our educational leadership. They stand proudly on international stages lecturing the world about Pacific resilience, while quietly presiding over the erasure of our indigenous linguistic soul at home.
This political apathy is a betrayal of public trust and displays a total lack of any duty of care. The ministry needs to get its house in order, without any excuses about tight budgets or teacher shortages.
The real reason is far uglier: our leaders suffer from a deep-seated colonial mindset. They would rather satisfy foreign globalist education benchmarks than protect the heritage of the people they govern. They have become active managers of our cultural liquidation, turning a blind eye to an active national disaster.
Illiteracy rips villages apart
The social repercussions of this literacy failure are currently tearing through our communities and traditional villages. In our iTaukei villages, custom and the vanua are preserved through precise, formal oral and written language structures.
When urbanised youth return to their villages completely illiterate and deaf to traditional ceremonies, they become alienated outsiders in their own ancestral homes.
They sit in silence during sacred rituals, unable to comprehend the wisdom of elders or read foundational scripts. Similarly, in Indo-Fijian families, spiritual literacy is collapsing, leaving youth unable to read the Ramayana or Bhagwat Geeta in their original forms.
This creates an explosive, dangerous generational chasm, transforming vibrant sanctuaries of living heritage into vacant spaces completely detached from their roots.
Breeding culturally castrated elites
This structural linguistic decay guarantees an impending crisis of national governance. The younger generation will be fundamentally unable to become great, authentic national leaders. True leadership in Fiji cannot be manufactured in air-conditioned boardrooms using English jargon and foreign ideologies.
It requires an organic, raw, and deeply emotional connection to grassroots citizens in our villages and settlements. A politician who cannot read, write, or speak with nuanced vernacular authority is an artificial fraud who cannot empathise with the common man.
By refusing to enforce compulsory literacy today, the state is breeding a future political class of elites completely alienated from their culture and identity. These future leaders will lack the raw backbone and cultural legitimacy required to defend our culture and identity as a nation.
A blueprint for survival
The 2013 Constitution commands the state to teach iTaukei and Hindi literacy in primary schools, yet our government ignores the supreme law.
Instead, our schools run as state-funded factories of erasure, grinding vernacular literacy and numeracy to total extinction. This neglect executes the total annihilation of our cultural heritage. The Ministry of Education must declare vernacular literacy a non-negotiable, compulsory subject, cutting funds from rogue institutions failing to comply with the 2013 Constitution.
We must overhaul teacher education and training to treat native scripts as elite academic disciplines with mandatory term examinations to secondary education levels.
We cannot remain silent while spineless bureaucrats trade our heritage away. Reclaim our linguistic literacy and numeracy ability, shut down these assimilation factories, break the chains of colonial shame, and fight for the sovereign heart of our nation. Without our written tongue, we as a nation, community and society have no soul.
n Dr Sushil K Sharma BA MA MEng (RMIT) PhD (Melbourne) is a WMO Accredited Class 1 Professional Meteorologist and former Aviation Meteorologist for British Aerospace, the Royal Saudi Air Force, and Bahrain Meteorological Service. He is a former Associate Professor of Meteorology at Fiji National University and Operational Meteorologist and the Manager of the Climate, Research and Services Division at Fiji Meteorological Services. The views expressed are the authors and not of this newspaper.
