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Sitiveni Rabuka still repeats, with a straight face, the tired mantra that his 1987 coups were about “protecting indigenous land, resources, and demography”. It is a line so often rehearsed that some have mistaken it for history. It never was. And it collapses under the weight of one irrefutable fact.
Rabuka overthrew an iTaukei prime minister on 14 May 1987.
Not just any iTaukei but Dr Timoci Bavadra, the first iTaukei Fijian from the western division of Fiji ever to become Prime Minister through the ballot box, and a man whose lineage runs directly to Chief Lutunasobasoba, the ancestor who landed at Vuda, the cradle of iTaukei civilisation, and not Vanua Levu, where Rabuka likes to pull the narrative.
So what “indigenous defence” is Rabuka talking about?
Which “resources” was he saving?
Which “demography” was he protecting when the elected leader he toppled was more deeply anchored in iTaukei history than Rabuka himself?
The truth is uglier, simpler, and far less convenient than the mythology he now peddles. Bavadra had to go not because he was a threat to indigenous rights, but because the multiracial government he led was a threat to the old political order that had grown comfortable treating Fiji as its hereditary estate.
Rabuka’s coup did not defend indigenous power. It fractured it, poisoned it, and set iTaukei against iTaukei in a way Fiji had never seen before.
Ask any honest historian: nothing in Bavadra’s programme endangered iTaukei land or resource ownership. No land was at risk. No customary rights were threatened. The Bogeyman was invented after the fact, retrofitted to justify treason.
But mythology has always been Rabuka’s real craft. A strongman’s power does not come from the gun he holds but from the story he tells about why he is holding it. For years, Fiji was asked to swallow the fiction that a coup against an iTaukei Prime Minister was somehow an act of indigenous salvation.
It wasn’t.
It was an act of political self-preservation dressed in the language of ethnic fear.
The great irony - the historical obscenity - is that Bavadra, a quiet doctor from Viseisei with ancestral links to Vuda’s first settlers, represented a more authentic indigenous leadership than the man who ousted him.
Rabuka did not save the indigenous people. He sabotaged their democratic voice, stole their moment of national leadership, and plunged them into decades of division.
If we are to confront Fiji’s past honestly, the first myth that must fall is Rabuka’s favourite one: that he acted for the land, the chiefs, the commoners, and the vanua.
He did not.
He acted against his own people’s elected leader.
And history, the real history, not Rabuka’s crocodile tears before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, will remember that.
Rabuka overthrew an iTaukei prime minister on 14 May 1987.
Not just any iTaukei but Dr Timoci Bavadra, the first iTaukei Fijian from the western division of Fiji ever to become Prime Minister through the ballot box, and a man whose lineage runs directly to Chief Lutunasobasoba, the ancestor who landed at Vuda, the cradle of iTaukei civilisation, and not Vanua Levu, where Rabuka likes to pull the narrative.
So what “indigenous defence” is Rabuka talking about?
Which “resources” was he saving?
Which “demography” was he protecting when the elected leader he toppled was more deeply anchored in iTaukei history than Rabuka himself?
The truth is uglier, simpler, and far less convenient than the mythology he now peddles. Bavadra had to go not because he was a threat to indigenous rights, but because the multiracial government he led was a threat to the old political order that had grown comfortable treating Fiji as its hereditary estate.
Rabuka’s coup did not defend indigenous power. It fractured it, poisoned it, and set iTaukei against iTaukei in a way Fiji had never seen before.
Ask any honest historian: nothing in Bavadra’s programme endangered iTaukei land or resource ownership. No land was at risk. No customary rights were threatened. The Bogeyman was invented after the fact, retrofitted to justify treason.
But mythology has always been Rabuka’s real craft. A strongman’s power does not come from the gun he holds but from the story he tells about why he is holding it. For years, Fiji was asked to swallow the fiction that a coup against an iTaukei Prime Minister was somehow an act of indigenous salvation.
It wasn’t.
It was an act of political self-preservation dressed in the language of ethnic fear.
The great irony - the historical obscenity - is that Bavadra, a quiet doctor from Viseisei with ancestral links to Vuda’s first settlers, represented a more authentic indigenous leadership than the man who ousted him.
Rabuka did not save the indigenous people. He sabotaged their democratic voice, stole their moment of national leadership, and plunged them into decades of division.
If we are to confront Fiji’s past honestly, the first myth that must fall is Rabuka’s favourite one: that he acted for the land, the chiefs, the commoners, and the vanua.
He did not.
He acted against his own people’s elected leader.
And history, the real history, not Rabuka’s crocodile tears before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, will remember that.
The National Bank of Fiji became iTaukei nationalists "ROBBERY BANK"
Sitiveni Rabuka to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission:
"The Great Council of Chiefs and some [Methodist] church leaders also encouraged the takeover in 1987."
 The late Apisai Tora |  |
Sitiveni Rabuka's Math in 1987 v 2025:
Seven Indo-Fijian Cabinet Ministers in Bavadra government = Domination
*Thirty iTaukei in Rabuka's Coalition government = Democracy
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 The late Dr Tupeni Baba, a founder of FLP |  The former Governor-General Ratu Sir George Cakobau had given his blessing for FLP to campaign in iTaukei villages |  Dr Bavadra among the voters |
"History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and |  |
*The above quote fits Coupist Sitiveni Rabuka extraordinarily well. Rabuka's political career mirrors Tocqueville's observation that history repeats itself with only mirror variations. Rabuka's actions in 1987, the mid-1990s, 2000, and his 2022 return all reproduce old dynamics: military intervention, constitutional manipulation, and ethnic based politics. He is both the "original picture" and the author of many subsequent "copies" in Fiji's political gallery.
