I will look after them. This was the promise made by The People’s Alliance party leader Sitiveni Rabuka to hundreds of supporters at a campaign meeting in Ba on Thursday night.
Mr Rabuka said he made the same promise to former Indian Army Chief General Sunith Francis Rodrigues, his instructor at the Indian Defence Services Staff College in Wellington, Tamil Nadu.
“He called me and said, ‘do you know what you are doing?’, ‘what are you going to do with our people?’” Mr Rabuka told the meeting.
“I said, ‘they are no longer your people, they are our people and I will look after them’.”
Mr Rabuka said he was also inspired by the late Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi who visited Fiji in 1981.
“I owe that to Mrs Ghandi when she came to Fiji and she spoke at Government House and she told what we now call the Indo-Fijians, and she said to them ‘you are no longer Indians, you belong here’, ‘give it everything you have’.”
Mr Rabuka said with the NFP leadership, they would form a government that could lead Fiji out of crisis.
“We’ve lived so long under fear, under oppression, under economic difficulties. We are in a crisis.
“And in times of crisis, people want leaders!”
