NO, I am not going to talk about that “COI” (we know it, live it, we’re sick of it).
The first reason I am not going to talk about it is that I took part in its proceedings as a lawyer. I seem to remember the first rule was that I was not supposed to talk about what happened there. Right now, reading the deluge of interview transcripts, videos, affidavits and other material appearing almost hourly in the public domain, I’m wondering if my memory is a bit faulty.
The second reason – well, there is no second reason.
Of course depending on your blogger of choice I’ve already committed multiple crimes, am desperate to suppress publication of the COI Report, am part of one team of conspirers or another, etc and don’t want to talk about it.
The COI and its consequences are a topic for another day, when all of us have been able to put a bit of distance between events (real and imagined) and the conspiracy theorists.
I have to confess some envy for them. As a humble lawyer who needs to deliver real work to real clients in order to earn my living, I am amazed at the time they have to pore over videos, dodgy documents and COI transcripts (all of which I thought were secret) and develop their complex theories about the vile deeds of their enemies.
As far as I can tell, everybody outside Suva is scratching their heads about all of this. They can’t understand how this thing – this “COI” – seems to have completely stopped in its tracks the business of Government – you know, health, education, water, power, creating jobs and growing the economy.
K1 and the protesters
Anyway, what I want to talk about instead is the recent controversy caused by Ketan Lal, one of our younger members of Parliament in Opposition.
I am not sure where he floats around in the Opposition. Since his FijiFirst party got blown up by its founders (the members didn’t seem to matter) it seems to have become a “G15” and a “G9”. That doesn’t add up to the FijiFirst party’s 26 seats, but nobody seems to be worrying about that overly much. Some time back Mr Lal withdrew from the G15. So what is he now? K1?
(Just an aside – if ever you have time on your hands, look up on the internet the disastrous story of Britain’s “K boats” built for World War I. Numbered K1-K18, they were (and I am not making this up) steam-powered submarines. Six of them sank; several more crashed into things and were written off. Only one of them (K-7) ever came into contact with the enemy (it fired a torpedo, which failed to explode).
Anyway, K1/Ketan comes to the surface from time to time attacking the Government for various things – fair enough, that’s his job I guess. But a few days ago he issued a statement criticising people from the vanua of Ra (he says “chiefs”, I am not sure how accurate that is) for staging a march through Rakiraki last week. The march was to demand that the 2013 Constitution be thrown out.
This was, he said, a “dangerous signal to the rule of law” and a threat to “the peace we have worked so hard to build.” He demanded to know how the Police and the Fiji Road Authority had allowed such an outrageous event to take place.
How was it, he grizzled, that “a protest seeking to undermine the very Constitution that governs this country was approved?”
“We can disagree politically, but let’s do it within the bounds of the law,” he said (which, to my mind, is what a peaceful protest march was doing).
K1 described the 2013 Constitution as “the foundation of stability, equal citizenry, and democratic processes” and to call for its abrogation “borders on sedition.” He went on to talk about the “dark days” before the 2013 Constitution and how “Fiji has come a long way”. He said the silence of the Prime Minister was “unacceptable” and he must “rise above political calculations and stand firm in defence of our Constitution.”
Perhaps the Prime Minister was silent because he hasn’t looked up from the 681-page report that all of Suva seems to want to get its hands on?
Anyway there may be more bad news for K1. Former MP Niko Nawaikula is calling in today’s Fiji Times for a peaceful march to protest against the 2013 Constitution – but that, too, is another story.
My natural instinct, of course, is to blast K1 for making a silly statement, but I am trying instead to understand how someone as youthful as him seems still to be living in the past – that is, the past of FijiFirst.
Not even three years on, it is hard to believe the 15 years we put up with the weird world of the FijiFirst party (even calling it a “party” might be a crime – because the law would punish a news organisation for calling it a “party” when it is no longer a registered party).
In that world, nobody was allowed protest marches at all, and – God forbid – certainly not against the 2013 Constitution.
The 2013 Constitution had brought us “true democracy” and “equal citizenry” and all those good things. We had (we were told) more human rights than we had ever had before (even if we couldn’t actually exercise many of them).
But it seemed to have created a world in which many people – including the K1s of the world – just do not understand the meaning of free speech.
The Constitution is not a sacred text shrouded in sanctity and mystery. In the simplest terms, it is just the rulebook we live by, some of us not very willingly (and it seems from the COI, not very skilfully).
The document belongs to us, even if none of us actually had any say in it. Our taxes pay for the institutions created by it. And now many of us want to change it. Why should we be stopped from marching peacefully through the streets of Rakiraki (or anywhere else) to say so?
Yes, we’ve done it all before
The unfortunate mindset of K1 – and many others who think like him – is that peace in Fiji, democracy in Fiji, harmony in Fiji all began with the 2013 Constitution.
Perhaps he needs to know a little bit more of his history. Long before 2013, that is how we lived – and we lived with freedom of speech and rule of law as well.
The real damage done by the 2006 coup, the 2013 Constitution that followed it and the distorted governance we suffered until the end of 2022 was that we did not have “true democracy”. We had a government where two people decided everything.
And when that government disappeared, Fiji was left with a series of power vacuums across many institutions of government which we have struggled successfully to fill, because we have all had to re-learn how real democratic institutions work – the separation of powers, the checks and balances, the constraints of an independent judiciary which may not be willing to do what the Government says.
And nobody would say that the current government has successfully learned all these lessons. It has been regularly rattled by mistakes, missteps and misjudgments. And all of these have taken place under the spotlight of a liberated news media which is happy to put them up in headlines.
The other consequence of the years of FijiFirst is a culture in which every legal mis-step is treated – literally – as a crime. Anything that anyone does which someone else doesn’t like is suddenly “abuse of office”. If you dare to dissent about wrongdoing within the earshot of some law enforcer, it becomes “obstruction of justice”.
Many mistakes are made by public officials – they are no more perfect than the rest of us. Many of them are made in good faith, often by people who really should have the skills and experience to know better. But that does not mean they are criminals.
So maybe it’s time for all of us to just calm down a bit. Not every protest march is sedition. Not every official decision we dislike demands a furious complaint to FICAC.
RICHARD NAIDU is a Suva lawyer. He hopes for a COI-free weekend. The views in this article are not necessarily the views of
The Fiji Times.
