Speaking truth to power – The A-G does not know everything

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Opposition MP Niko Nawaikula outside the Suva High Court during his trial last month. Picture: RAMA

By SEVANAIA SAKAI and DR TUI RAKUITA

Because of time and space limitations, we are going to advance a few well-grounded assumptions in this article.

The first is that our Attorney-General and Minister of Economy does not know everything there is to know under the Sun.

The second is that there is more that he does not know about a lot of issues in the country than he would imagine.

The third is that there are competent Fijians in Fiji and abroad who are more knowledgeable than him on subjects such as race and ethnicity, research samples and sampling methods.

The same applies to broad socio-economic models of development that are more conducive to our context than the one he, on behalf of government, currently espouses.

After listening to his diatribe, in recent weeks on a range of issues from USP to the lacklustre courtroom performances by certain lawyers to the supposed research failings of Government statisticians, we have come to the conclusion that Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, as the chief political architect of our country, is more concerned about power than truth.

We will now outline below the reasons why:

Are we living in a rogue state?

In our view, Fiji is becoming more and more illiberal.

One may ask what is an illiberal democracy?

Simply put, it is a form of governance that strives to adhere to democratic forms rather than norms.

In other words, we would expect these democracies to have periodic elections, the proclaimed independence of the three branches of the state and the protection of civil liberties.

At the same time, we would also see the attempt by those in positions of political influence to use their power to disqualify their political adversaries in a number of ways.

This can range from making new laws so that voting becomes more difficult for certain groups of people, to illegitimate attempts to use the law to fulfil unsavory political ends.

This is what is happening in some Republican states in the United States such as Texas.

Closer to home, the disqualification from Parliament of Opposition MP Niko Nawaikula has highlighted the machinations in the highest corridors of power to silence the opposition.

Illiberal democracies come about, in our view, when free and fair elections regularly put people who are ill-suited to positions of power at the helm of leadership.

As such, these politicians often go beyond their constitutional limits to deprive their citizens of basic civil liberties in an ill-disguised bid to push forward seemingly self-serving agendas couched, of course, in either legal logic or emotional blackmail.

This happened in Brazil in the 1960s, when only literate people were given the franchise, denying the right to vote to the masses.

As a result, the elites kept their hold on absolute power with accompanying high levels of corruption.

The perverse irony in our case is that while our police engage in hushed middle-of-the-night arrests of citizens and unexplained deportations of expatriates, Fiji holds the presidency of the UN Human Rights Council.

The potency of ethnic analysis

Class, age, gender and ethnic considerations, amongst other variables, tend to overlap in the field of social policy formation.

Each variable can be used as a prism from which to identify policy gaps that otherwise would not be so obvious to law-makers.

For instance, the Fiji Prison Annual Report noted that the prison population in Fiji between the two major ethnic groups in the years 1988–1991 was comprised, on average, of around 77 per cent iTaukei and 21 per cent Fijians of Indian heritage.

If we fast forward from those years to 2015-2018, we find that percentages remain somewhat the same for the iTaukei ethnic group (77 per cent) while the imprisonment rate for Fijians of Indian heritage, at the same time, was around 18 per cent (why haven’t we sacked the Commissioner of Prisons for publishing disaggregated data on the prison population?).

This marked a decrease of 3 per cent among the group made up by Fijians of Indian heritage.

On the face of this disparity we can conclude that nothing has actually changed in terms of the ethnic makeup of our prison population despite our best efforts to curb crime.

In light of this, we need to be drafting policies to address the iTaukei problem in our prisons. These policies must work in tandem with the efforts of civil society organisations and religious groups.

The outlawing of the use of ethnicity in policy making processes has the effect of blunting government initiatives in addressing social anomalies that may be specific to a particular ethnic group in light of their cultural outlooks and challenges.

This throws into sharp relief the recent outbursts by our A-G, in Parliament, on how ethnicity is not an important variable in policy formulations!

The rant actually suggests that Mr Sayed-Khaiyum’s main worry is not so much the publicising of the disaggregated data by the HIES report as to how this actually falsifies Government claims of unprecedented economic growth, and by extension development, in the last ten years.

This report, as far as they are concerned, is a political disaster and thus is a threat to their hold on power. The subsequent denials based on, in our view, flimsy grounds stem from the need to save face when confronted with such an alarming reality.

Therefore, the logic goes, we can rely on the figures in the HIES report until such a time when more competent commentators on these issues come up with a more reasonable alternative account as to why such figures are not worth the paper they are written on.

Conclusion

The issues raised above are just a synopsis of the many ways in which policy decisions by our political leaders may actually be harmful to the people they were designed to serve.

The final question that we are posing to our leaders in light of our discussion above is: Is this the best you can do?

  • SEVANAIA SAKAI teaches at the School of Law and Social Science (USP). TUI RAKUITA teaches at the School of Pacific Arts, Communication and Education (USP). The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of their employer or The Fiji Times.
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