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Saukuru In July 2000, during the George Speight coup, I warned that political chiefs and ethno-nationalists were silencing ordinary iTaukei and claiming authority to determine the fate of Fijians and non-Fijians alike. Jese Saukuru’s declaration that his political future rests with his vanua and chiefs, and the proposed stand-alone legislation for the Great Council of Chiefs, forces us to ask whether that warning remains relevant in 2026.
Twenty-six years ago, as George Speight and his armed supporters held Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry and members of his government hostage in Parliament, I wrote an analysis for Fiji's Daily Post under the heading: ‘The Fijian commoners will be imprisoned by George Speight and the chiefs’ escapades: one dead, the other powerless to be born.’
The argument was controversial then. It will remain controversial now.
I argued that Speight’s overthrow of Fiji’s democratically elected government had not merely removed the country’s first Indo-Fijian Prime Minister. It had also stripped ordinary iTaukei of their democratic power.
Speight and his supporters purported to act for indigenous Fijians. But their resort to force silenced the very people in whose name they claimed to speak. Having displaced the elected government, they turned to the Great Council of Chiefs to decide the political future of the country.
Once again, chiefs were being asked to determine the fate of iTaukei and non-iTaukei alike.
The uncomfortable question in 2000 was whether the chiefly establishment would protect constitutional democracy or allow itself to become the vehicle through which un-elected men converted violence, racial nationalism and political ambition into authority.
The uncomfortable question in 2026 is not identical. There are no armed men holding a government hostage inside Parliament. But the underlying conflict between inherited authority and democratic citizenship has returned.
Minister for Youth and Sports Jese Saukuru says his decision on whether to contest the next general election will depend upon his vanua and chiefs. At the same time, the Coalition Government is moving towards stand-alone legislation for the Great Council of Chiefs.
Fiji must therefore ask: where does legitimate respect for chiefly authority end, and where does democratic political authority begin?
What I argued in July 2000
My analysis traced the political role of Fiji’s chiefly establishment from the colonial period to the Speight coup.
I recalled a private letter sent to the Colonial Office in London by Governor Sir George O’Brien in December 1897. Writing about Britain’s policy of governing Fiji through the chiefs, O’Brien compared the relationship to that of a circus showman and his trained animal.
His brutally revealing conclusion was: ‘After many years of governing Fiji through the chiefs we are able to make them do anything we like.’
The offensive language belonged to the colonial governor. But the institutional point was unmistakable.
British recognition of chiefly authority was not merely an innocent act of cultural preservation. The colonial administration reshaped and incorporated chiefly power into a machinery of indirect rule. Chiefs became intermediaries between the government and ordinary iTaukei.
That system protected important aspects of indigenous land and communal organisation. But it also enabled the colonial government to administer the iTaukei population through a hierarchy which ordinary people had little democratic power to challenge.
The system was neither uniform nor accepted without resistance. The Deed of Cession did not command universal support, particularly among communities in western and central Viti Levu. Some regarded Cession as bringing not only British authority but also the domination of eastern chiefs.
Colonial rule helped create what scholars later described as the bureaucratic chief: a traditional leader whose authority became intertwined with the administrative state.
The result was the creation of a separate system of iTaukei administration, a state within the colonial state. Chiefs were never a single political bloc. The 2000 analysis did not contend that every chief was hostile to democracy or that all chiefly authority was illegitimate. Such a claim would have been historically false.
Chiefs have differed sharply among themselves. Some have acted as stabilising national figures. Others have supported multiracial government and constitutional compromise. Some have resisted extremism. Others have entered party politics or allowed traditional authority to be employed for partisan purposes.
Nor have ordinary iTaukei ever formed a single obedient political bloc.
Challenges to the established chiefly order emerged repeatedly. Apolosi Nawai challenged colonial economic and political authority. Apisai Tora articulated western resentment towards the dominance of eastern chiefly interests. Ratu Osea Gavidi and the Western United Front later gave organised political expression to similar grievances.
Sakeasi Butadroka, notwithstanding the racial politics with which his name became associated, distinguished between traditional respect and political obedience. He could recognise a person’s chiefly status while challenging that same person politically.
That distinction remains vital.
One may respect a chief within the customary order without surrendering one’s political judgment to that chief.
Dr Timoci Bavadra showed another way
The late Dr Timoci Bavadra expressed the principle with particular clarity before the 1987 election.
Bavadra respected his traditional relationships with the Tui Vuda and Nakelo. But he rejected the proposition that chiefly authority dictated his political allegiance. His loyalty within the vanua remained intact; his political beliefs were his own.
That was not an attack upon iTaukei culture. It was an attempt to reconcile tradition with citizenship.
Bavadra understood what Fiji still struggles to accept: a person can honour a chief without voting for the chief, the chief’s relative or the chief’s preferred political party.
A commoner who disagrees with a chief is not necessarily rejecting the vanua. A woman who challenges a chiefly decision is not abandoning her culture. A young person who votes differently from village elders is exercising a constitutional right, not committing an act of traditional rebellion.
The ballot must remain personal, equal and secret.
The chiefly establishment and national politics
At independence in 1970, political leadership remained concentrated largely in the eastern chiefly establishment associated with the Alliance Party.
The Great Council of Chiefs acquired a formal constitutional role. It nominated members of the Senate and enjoyed special influence over legislation affecting iTaukei land and customary rights.
Indo-Fijian leaders had accepted this arrangement as part of the negotiated independence settlement. But political conflict inevitably followed when criticism of Alliance Party leaders was interpreted as an attack upon chiefs and, by extension, upon the iTaukei community itself.
The distinction between a chief, a party politician and a national office-holder became blurred.
Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara himself once described the multiple capacities in which he operated: citizen, traditional chief, party leader and Prime Minister. The difficulty was not that one man occupied those different positions. The difficulty was deciding which authority was being exercised at any particular moment, and whether political criticism was being improperly converted into cultural disrespect.
That problem has never entirely disappeared.
A politician who invokes chiefly status gains an advantage unavailable to an ordinary candidate. A critic may be accused not merely of opposing a policy but of insulting the vanua. A political disagreement can then be recast as a cultural offence.
Democratic accountability becomes extremely difficult when questioning a politician is treated as questioning tradition itself.
The warning from 1982
The conflict did not begin with the coups of 1987 or 2000.
After the bitterly contested 1982 general election, the Ra Provincial Council proposed that the offices of Governor-General and Prime Minister should be reserved for indigenous Fijians. It also proposed a racially weighted parliamentary arrangement.
The Great Council of Chiefs endorsed the resolutions.
To Indo-Fijians, the episode presented the GCC not as an impartial custodian of indigenous culture but as an institution willing to promote racial political supremacy.
The Fiji Sun warned at the time that the proposal could transform Fiji from a democracy into an autocracy or dictatorship and march the country backwards.
Five years later, the first military coup took place.
History does not move in a perfectly straight line, and it would be wrong to claim that one GCC resolution caused the events of 1987. But the political climate in which racial entitlement was elevated above electoral choice helped prepare the ground.
When democratic outcomes become acceptable only if they produce the ‘right’ ethnic or chiefly leadership, elections cease to have any secure meaning.
George Speight exploited the contradiction
Speight presented the 2000 takeover as an assertion of indigenous rights. Yet he was not authorised by the iTaukei electorate to overthrow the government.
No national vote empowered him to enter Parliament with armed men. No referendum instructed him to hold ministers hostage. No democratic process authorised his supporters to remove the Constitution.
The coup-makers nevertheless claimed to represent the indigenous people as a collective body. That claim depended upon treating the iTaukei as though they possessed one political will capable of being declared by self-appointed nationalists and ratified by chiefs.
Ordinary iTaukei were reduced from citizens to followers.
That was why I argued in July 2000 that the coup had stripped ordinary iTaukei Fijians of their power. If chiefly and nationalist elites could speak conclusively on their behalf, there was no need to ask how individual iTaukei had voted or what they believed.
Their democratic citizenship had been swallowed by an invented communal voice.
Is the 2000 argument still relevant in 2026? Yes but it requires an important qualification.
Fiji in 2026 is not Fiji in July 2000.
The present Government was formed through parliamentary processes. The restored GCC has not seized power. Saukuru has not advocated a coup, racial exclusion or violence. His statement may amount only to a respectful promise to consult his traditional community.
It would therefore be unfair to place Saukuru in the same category as Speight or to describe the restored GCC as the institution which confronted Fiji during the hostage crisis.
But the constitutional principle at stake remains remarkably similar.
Who has the right to determine political representation?
Is it the individual citizen, exercising a secret ballot? Is it the political party applying transparent selection criteria? Or is it an unelected hierarchy claiming to express the collective will of a vanua, province or ethnic community?
When Saukuru says his political future will be decided by his vanua and chiefs, he revives the very ambiguity about which I wrote 26 years ago.
Does he mean that he will respectfully seek their advice? Or does he mean that they possess the authority to decide whether he may present himself to the national electorate?
The first is culturally understandable. The second is democratically troubling.
Which vanua, and whose voice?
The word vanua carries deep cultural, spiritual and communal meaning. But it cannot be treated as though it automatically produces a single political opinion.
Within every vanua there are differences between chiefs and commoners, women and men, young and old, rural and urban residents, wealthy families and struggling households.
There are also differences among provinces and confederacies. Fiji’s chiefly order has never been a perfectly uniform national system. Historical authority, customary structures and relationships with the colonial and post-colonial state have varied considerably.
Western political challenges to eastern chiefly dominance are part of Fiji’s history. So too are disputes over titles, boundaries, succession and representation.
Who, then, determines what ‘the vanua’ has decided?
Is there a vote? Are women equally heard? May a commoner openly oppose the preferred position of a chief? Are young people consulted? Is disagreement recorded, or is silence interpreted as consent?
A minister cannot invoke the vanua as a source of authority without answering whose voice within that vanua is being heard.
The Great Council of Chiefs in 2026
The same questions must be addressed in the proposed stand-alone legislation for the GCC.
The Council may have an important role in protecting iTaukei culture, customary institutions, indigenous knowledge, language and communal interests. Fiji need not destroy traditional institutions in order to preserve democracy.
But Parliament must define the GCC’s boundaries.
Will it be a cultural and advisory body, or will it acquire political influence over government, constitutional reform and national appointments? Will it speak on matters directly affecting iTaukei customary interests, or will it presume to speak for the whole country?
Will its representatives be accountable to the iTaukei people, or only to the chiefly structures which select them? What meaningful place will be provided for women, young people and non-chiefly iTaukei? How will provincial differences be reconciled? How will political neutrality be enforced?
The Government’s 2023 GCC review itself recommended an independent and politically neutral Council. That recommendation should not be treated as ceremonial language. It must be translated into enforceable statutory safeguards.
A politically neutral GCC should not endorse candidates or parties. It should not permit its meetings to become platforms for electoral mobilisation. Its members should disclose political and financial interests. Its public funding should be fully audited. Its advice to government should be published except where genuinely confidential customary matters are involved.
Most importantly, the Council must not be used to convert chiefly prestige into political command.
Commoners must not again become spectators
My central concern in 2000 was not hostility towards chiefs. It was the political fate of ordinary iTaukei that I grew up with in Tailevu and the four storey Raiwaqa-Raiwai block of flats.
Too often, arguments advanced in the name of indigenous paramountcy have benefited a small political and chiefly elite while leaving commoners facing poverty, poor housing, limited educational opportunities, unemployment, HIV epidemic, and inadequate public services.
Invoking the vanua does not itself improve village water supplies. Chiefly speeches do not create employment. Political appeals to indigenous unity cannot substitute for audited expenditure, competent administration and measurable development.
The condition of ordinary iTaukei must be judged by material outcomes, not by the number of traditional institutions restored in their name.
If the GCC is to justify public funding and statutory recognition, it must demonstrate how it improves the lives of the people. It cannot rely indefinitely upon historical prestige.
Nor should political leaders hide behind chiefs to avoid personal responsibility. Saukuru must account for his ministerial performance and decide whether he wishes to seek another mandate. Chiefs cannot make that decision for him, and they cannot answer to the national electorate on his behalf.
One dead, the other still struggling to be born
The phrase I used in 2000 - ‘one dead, the other powerless to be born’ - described a political society trapped between two systems.
The old order could no longer command unquestioned obedience. Yet a fully democratic order, founded upon equal individual citizenship, had repeatedly been prevented from taking root.
Twenty-six years later, that struggle has not ended.
Fiji has held elections and embraced a common national franchise. Yet politicians continue to invoke race, province, church and chiefly authority when convenient. Traditional institutions remain vulnerable to party-political capture. Ordinary citizens are still told, directly or indirectly, that communal loyalty should shape their political choices.
The question is not whether chiefs should exist. They do, and they remain important to many iTaukei.
The question is whether chiefly authority should carry privileged political power over citizens who did not elect it.
Tradition deserves respect. Indigenous culture deserves protection. Chiefs may offer counsel, preserve customary knowledge and help mediate disputes.
But elected government must derive its authority from citizens, and every citizen must remain free to disagree with a chief without forfeiting his or her place in the vanua.
That was the principle at the heart of my warning in July 2000. It remains relevant in September 2026.
If anything, Saukuru’s statement and the proposed stand-alone GCC legislation make it necessary to repeat it: A chief may lead within the customary order. A voter alone must decide at the ballot box.
Source: Victor Lal’s July 2000 analysis, republished by Fijileaks in 2015
The argument was controversial then. It will remain controversial now.
I argued that Speight’s overthrow of Fiji’s democratically elected government had not merely removed the country’s first Indo-Fijian Prime Minister. It had also stripped ordinary iTaukei of their democratic power.
Speight and his supporters purported to act for indigenous Fijians. But their resort to force silenced the very people in whose name they claimed to speak. Having displaced the elected government, they turned to the Great Council of Chiefs to decide the political future of the country.
Once again, chiefs were being asked to determine the fate of iTaukei and non-iTaukei alike.
The uncomfortable question in 2000 was whether the chiefly establishment would protect constitutional democracy or allow itself to become the vehicle through which un-elected men converted violence, racial nationalism and political ambition into authority.
The uncomfortable question in 2026 is not identical. There are no armed men holding a government hostage inside Parliament. But the underlying conflict between inherited authority and democratic citizenship has returned.
Minister for Youth and Sports Jese Saukuru says his decision on whether to contest the next general election will depend upon his vanua and chiefs. At the same time, the Coalition Government is moving towards stand-alone legislation for the Great Council of Chiefs.
Fiji must therefore ask: where does legitimate respect for chiefly authority end, and where does democratic political authority begin?
What I argued in July 2000
My analysis traced the political role of Fiji’s chiefly establishment from the colonial period to the Speight coup.
I recalled a private letter sent to the Colonial Office in London by Governor Sir George O’Brien in December 1897. Writing about Britain’s policy of governing Fiji through the chiefs, O’Brien compared the relationship to that of a circus showman and his trained animal.
His brutally revealing conclusion was: ‘After many years of governing Fiji through the chiefs we are able to make them do anything we like.’
The offensive language belonged to the colonial governor. But the institutional point was unmistakable.
British recognition of chiefly authority was not merely an innocent act of cultural preservation. The colonial administration reshaped and incorporated chiefly power into a machinery of indirect rule. Chiefs became intermediaries between the government and ordinary iTaukei.
That system protected important aspects of indigenous land and communal organisation. But it also enabled the colonial government to administer the iTaukei population through a hierarchy which ordinary people had little democratic power to challenge.
The system was neither uniform nor accepted without resistance. The Deed of Cession did not command universal support, particularly among communities in western and central Viti Levu. Some regarded Cession as bringing not only British authority but also the domination of eastern chiefs.
Colonial rule helped create what scholars later described as the bureaucratic chief: a traditional leader whose authority became intertwined with the administrative state.
The result was the creation of a separate system of iTaukei administration, a state within the colonial state. Chiefs were never a single political bloc. The 2000 analysis did not contend that every chief was hostile to democracy or that all chiefly authority was illegitimate. Such a claim would have been historically false.
Chiefs have differed sharply among themselves. Some have acted as stabilising national figures. Others have supported multiracial government and constitutional compromise. Some have resisted extremism. Others have entered party politics or allowed traditional authority to be employed for partisan purposes.
Nor have ordinary iTaukei ever formed a single obedient political bloc.
Challenges to the established chiefly order emerged repeatedly. Apolosi Nawai challenged colonial economic and political authority. Apisai Tora articulated western resentment towards the dominance of eastern chiefly interests. Ratu Osea Gavidi and the Western United Front later gave organised political expression to similar grievances.
Sakeasi Butadroka, notwithstanding the racial politics with which his name became associated, distinguished between traditional respect and political obedience. He could recognise a person’s chiefly status while challenging that same person politically.
That distinction remains vital.
One may respect a chief within the customary order without surrendering one’s political judgment to that chief.
Dr Timoci Bavadra showed another way
The late Dr Timoci Bavadra expressed the principle with particular clarity before the 1987 election.
Bavadra respected his traditional relationships with the Tui Vuda and Nakelo. But he rejected the proposition that chiefly authority dictated his political allegiance. His loyalty within the vanua remained intact; his political beliefs were his own.
That was not an attack upon iTaukei culture. It was an attempt to reconcile tradition with citizenship.
Bavadra understood what Fiji still struggles to accept: a person can honour a chief without voting for the chief, the chief’s relative or the chief’s preferred political party.
A commoner who disagrees with a chief is not necessarily rejecting the vanua. A woman who challenges a chiefly decision is not abandoning her culture. A young person who votes differently from village elders is exercising a constitutional right, not committing an act of traditional rebellion.
The ballot must remain personal, equal and secret.
The chiefly establishment and national politics
At independence in 1970, political leadership remained concentrated largely in the eastern chiefly establishment associated with the Alliance Party.
The Great Council of Chiefs acquired a formal constitutional role. It nominated members of the Senate and enjoyed special influence over legislation affecting iTaukei land and customary rights.
Indo-Fijian leaders had accepted this arrangement as part of the negotiated independence settlement. But political conflict inevitably followed when criticism of Alliance Party leaders was interpreted as an attack upon chiefs and, by extension, upon the iTaukei community itself.
The distinction between a chief, a party politician and a national office-holder became blurred.
Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara himself once described the multiple capacities in which he operated: citizen, traditional chief, party leader and Prime Minister. The difficulty was not that one man occupied those different positions. The difficulty was deciding which authority was being exercised at any particular moment, and whether political criticism was being improperly converted into cultural disrespect.
That problem has never entirely disappeared.
A politician who invokes chiefly status gains an advantage unavailable to an ordinary candidate. A critic may be accused not merely of opposing a policy but of insulting the vanua. A political disagreement can then be recast as a cultural offence.
Democratic accountability becomes extremely difficult when questioning a politician is treated as questioning tradition itself.
The warning from 1982
The conflict did not begin with the coups of 1987 or 2000.
After the bitterly contested 1982 general election, the Ra Provincial Council proposed that the offices of Governor-General and Prime Minister should be reserved for indigenous Fijians. It also proposed a racially weighted parliamentary arrangement.
The Great Council of Chiefs endorsed the resolutions.
To Indo-Fijians, the episode presented the GCC not as an impartial custodian of indigenous culture but as an institution willing to promote racial political supremacy.
The Fiji Sun warned at the time that the proposal could transform Fiji from a democracy into an autocracy or dictatorship and march the country backwards.
Five years later, the first military coup took place.
History does not move in a perfectly straight line, and it would be wrong to claim that one GCC resolution caused the events of 1987. But the political climate in which racial entitlement was elevated above electoral choice helped prepare the ground.
When democratic outcomes become acceptable only if they produce the ‘right’ ethnic or chiefly leadership, elections cease to have any secure meaning.
George Speight exploited the contradiction
Speight presented the 2000 takeover as an assertion of indigenous rights. Yet he was not authorised by the iTaukei electorate to overthrow the government.
No national vote empowered him to enter Parliament with armed men. No referendum instructed him to hold ministers hostage. No democratic process authorised his supporters to remove the Constitution.
The coup-makers nevertheless claimed to represent the indigenous people as a collective body. That claim depended upon treating the iTaukei as though they possessed one political will capable of being declared by self-appointed nationalists and ratified by chiefs.
Ordinary iTaukei were reduced from citizens to followers.
That was why I argued in July 2000 that the coup had stripped ordinary iTaukei Fijians of their power. If chiefly and nationalist elites could speak conclusively on their behalf, there was no need to ask how individual iTaukei had voted or what they believed.
Their democratic citizenship had been swallowed by an invented communal voice.
Is the 2000 argument still relevant in 2026? Yes but it requires an important qualification.
Fiji in 2026 is not Fiji in July 2000.
The present Government was formed through parliamentary processes. The restored GCC has not seized power. Saukuru has not advocated a coup, racial exclusion or violence. His statement may amount only to a respectful promise to consult his traditional community.
It would therefore be unfair to place Saukuru in the same category as Speight or to describe the restored GCC as the institution which confronted Fiji during the hostage crisis.
But the constitutional principle at stake remains remarkably similar.
Who has the right to determine political representation?
Is it the individual citizen, exercising a secret ballot? Is it the political party applying transparent selection criteria? Or is it an unelected hierarchy claiming to express the collective will of a vanua, province or ethnic community?
When Saukuru says his political future will be decided by his vanua and chiefs, he revives the very ambiguity about which I wrote 26 years ago.
Does he mean that he will respectfully seek their advice? Or does he mean that they possess the authority to decide whether he may present himself to the national electorate?
The first is culturally understandable. The second is democratically troubling.
Which vanua, and whose voice?
The word vanua carries deep cultural, spiritual and communal meaning. But it cannot be treated as though it automatically produces a single political opinion.
Within every vanua there are differences between chiefs and commoners, women and men, young and old, rural and urban residents, wealthy families and struggling households.
There are also differences among provinces and confederacies. Fiji’s chiefly order has never been a perfectly uniform national system. Historical authority, customary structures and relationships with the colonial and post-colonial state have varied considerably.
Western political challenges to eastern chiefly dominance are part of Fiji’s history. So too are disputes over titles, boundaries, succession and representation.
Who, then, determines what ‘the vanua’ has decided?
Is there a vote? Are women equally heard? May a commoner openly oppose the preferred position of a chief? Are young people consulted? Is disagreement recorded, or is silence interpreted as consent?
A minister cannot invoke the vanua as a source of authority without answering whose voice within that vanua is being heard.
The Great Council of Chiefs in 2026
The same questions must be addressed in the proposed stand-alone legislation for the GCC.
The Council may have an important role in protecting iTaukei culture, customary institutions, indigenous knowledge, language and communal interests. Fiji need not destroy traditional institutions in order to preserve democracy.
But Parliament must define the GCC’s boundaries.
Will it be a cultural and advisory body, or will it acquire political influence over government, constitutional reform and national appointments? Will it speak on matters directly affecting iTaukei customary interests, or will it presume to speak for the whole country?
Will its representatives be accountable to the iTaukei people, or only to the chiefly structures which select them? What meaningful place will be provided for women, young people and non-chiefly iTaukei? How will provincial differences be reconciled? How will political neutrality be enforced?
The Government’s 2023 GCC review itself recommended an independent and politically neutral Council. That recommendation should not be treated as ceremonial language. It must be translated into enforceable statutory safeguards.
A politically neutral GCC should not endorse candidates or parties. It should not permit its meetings to become platforms for electoral mobilisation. Its members should disclose political and financial interests. Its public funding should be fully audited. Its advice to government should be published except where genuinely confidential customary matters are involved.
Most importantly, the Council must not be used to convert chiefly prestige into political command.
Commoners must not again become spectators
My central concern in 2000 was not hostility towards chiefs. It was the political fate of ordinary iTaukei that I grew up with in Tailevu and the four storey Raiwaqa-Raiwai block of flats.
Too often, arguments advanced in the name of indigenous paramountcy have benefited a small political and chiefly elite while leaving commoners facing poverty, poor housing, limited educational opportunities, unemployment, HIV epidemic, and inadequate public services.
Invoking the vanua does not itself improve village water supplies. Chiefly speeches do not create employment. Political appeals to indigenous unity cannot substitute for audited expenditure, competent administration and measurable development.
The condition of ordinary iTaukei must be judged by material outcomes, not by the number of traditional institutions restored in their name.
If the GCC is to justify public funding and statutory recognition, it must demonstrate how it improves the lives of the people. It cannot rely indefinitely upon historical prestige.
Nor should political leaders hide behind chiefs to avoid personal responsibility. Saukuru must account for his ministerial performance and decide whether he wishes to seek another mandate. Chiefs cannot make that decision for him, and they cannot answer to the national electorate on his behalf.
One dead, the other still struggling to be born
The phrase I used in 2000 - ‘one dead, the other powerless to be born’ - described a political society trapped between two systems.
The old order could no longer command unquestioned obedience. Yet a fully democratic order, founded upon equal individual citizenship, had repeatedly been prevented from taking root.
Twenty-six years later, that struggle has not ended.
Fiji has held elections and embraced a common national franchise. Yet politicians continue to invoke race, province, church and chiefly authority when convenient. Traditional institutions remain vulnerable to party-political capture. Ordinary citizens are still told, directly or indirectly, that communal loyalty should shape their political choices.
The question is not whether chiefs should exist. They do, and they remain important to many iTaukei.
The question is whether chiefly authority should carry privileged political power over citizens who did not elect it.
Tradition deserves respect. Indigenous culture deserves protection. Chiefs may offer counsel, preserve customary knowledge and help mediate disputes.
But elected government must derive its authority from citizens, and every citizen must remain free to disagree with a chief without forfeiting his or her place in the vanua.
That was the principle at the heart of my warning in July 2000. It remains relevant in September 2026.
If anything, Saukuru’s statement and the proposed stand-alone GCC legislation make it necessary to repeat it: A chief may lead within the customary order. A voter alone must decide at the ballot box.
Source: Victor Lal’s July 2000 analysis, republished by Fijileaks in 2015
