TUI Nayau Ratu Tevita Uluilakeba Mara has called for fairness from Government over the distribution of funding to rural and maritime communities.
Following an official five-day visit to Australia where he met with his kinsmen, Ratu Tevita noted how many of their conversations focused on the government funded developments in communities across the country.
He said while he welcomed and supported the construction of new roads built in Vanua Levu and Taveuni, there was a need to also focus on other maritime communities.
“What I ask for is fairness,” he said.
“There are islands in my province where a mother carrying a baby must be handed out of a small boat into the swell, because there is nowhere to land – Nayau, Moce, Kabara, Ono-i-Lau, Fulaga.
“I could name more. We are not asking for anything grand. We are asking for somewhere to put our feet down.”
The Tui Nayau, however, maintained their concern does not take away the equally important needs of other communities.
“And let no one hear this as one province speaking against another. Lau wants nothing that belongs to Vanua Levu, or to Kadavu, or Rotuma, or the villages in the highlands of Viti Levu, or the settlements of the cane belt. Their case is ours. This country is not a small table with too many hands reaching for it. We are one people — iTaukei, Indo-Fijian, Rotuman, and everyone else who calls these islands home and a nation is measured by how it treats those who live furthest from its capital.”
He said the province, while small, had contributed immensely to Fiji’s economy.
“I am told sometimes that money spent in Lau does not return.
“Fiji’s economy is not held up only in the places where the money is made. It is held up by people from those small islands who run businesses in Suva, Lautoka and Labasa, who teach in our schools and nurse in our hospitals, who serve in the Force and in the church – and by our sons and daughters overseas, in the very places I have just come from, whose remittances have carried this country through every hard year it has had.”
