More Regime Rubbish!

Some things that have been bothering me about recent developments:

For instance, Mahen’s proposal of contract Sugar farming for de-reserved native land. Basically, contract farming is small farming done right. It is the way that Crest Chicken successfully outsources it’s chicken production, and it is the way that the Sugar industry should have been set up in the first place. Professor John Davies recommended this model almost 10 years ago, but it has always been rejected by Chaudhry and the NFU. ALTA is a very restrictive legislation, and may not even allow contract farming. But the very fact that Chaudhry is offering it as a sweetener now suggests that it may in fact be possible under ALTA. The question then looms, sugar’s overall viability aside, why is he only offering this solution for de-reserved land? Why not for all Sugar land? If contract farming so great for one kind of land, why is it not even considered for existing sugar land, where landowners can get 33% of proceeds there too? On the other hand, why did they have to go to all the effort and expense of convening CBUL just to re-propose the 10% UCV rentals that has been “on the table” since 1999, meaning that Chaudhry could have agreed to it any time since then if he was really serious? The reason is two-faced, liu-muri politics as usual!

The second thing that annoys me about this is the IG’s usual habit of not practicing what they preach. Frank and John Sami have made a big deal of trying to build what they call a “trust-based society” through their Charter. Nice words as usual, but how does this happen practically? How for example do Frank and Mahen propose to cultivate trust with Fijians when they have gone behind their backs on the sensitive matter of land with CBUL, the native land de-reservation program, and unilateral, unlawful and unchecked changes to the Native Lands Board and Act? They have already demonstrated their lack of respect for Fijian choices and views by illegally removing their lawful choice of Government!

So assurances of land safety, and tabetabe promises to respect landowners just don’t “cut it” when there’s also no guarantee that these guys even know what they’re talking about, or that any of their proposals will succeed anyway. And in any case, there’s certainly no sign that they are prioritizing landowner interests in this? If they were really serious about building trust and sustainability, they simply wouldn’t be bull-dozing their way over landowner concerns. They would just take as long as it needed, and do whatever it took, to gain landowner trust BEFORE proceeding. But the fact that they are racing ahead helter-skelter, shows that trust-building and sustainability is not their primary interest here. No – their real priority is their mad rush to try and “resurrect” the Sugar industry out of the doldrums before the next elections, because their primary concern is their own political credibility then! So much for their claims that their clean-up takeover was the only way to fix Fiji’s “deeper issues” that democracy and the rule of law supposedly couldn’t fix!

And another thing, I completely disagree with John Sami over his rubbish claim that the Military Charter is Frank’s “exit strategy” from the quagmire of the December 6th coup! Garbage! The Charter is Frank’s RE-ENTRY strategy to give him carte blanche (denied to him under the Constitution), to intervene militarily into civilian political affairs any time the will of the people and parliament departs from his own ignorant opinions in future! Bugger that! We’ve already seen what his dimwit opinions, “solutions” and politics have done to Fiji since December ‘06! Why would we want to accommodate that sort of interference again in future?

Finally, the Charter’s real aim is to simply give the regime/FLP a tax-payer funded “free ride” of feel-good campaigning in the run up to next year’s elections. In any election campaign, all candidates are allowed to promote their own views & policies, and criticize those of their competitors. But the grassroots Charter promotion process, amply buttressed by Raturala’s daily dose of dung, will merely be the latest version of the disastrous Truth and Justice campaign. A political campaign masquerading as a nation-building program, it will be a free ride not just in terms of funding, but also in terms of opposition. Any opponents will be loudly maligned in the media and via the process itself, as only “wanting to prevent the nation from moving forward”! But I’m betting that despite all this liu muri rigging and handicapping, it’ll just turn out to be another T&J debacle in the end because Fijians aren’t as gullible as they think!

By the way, has anyone ever heard of a Government leader going overseas just to “inspect” a hospital? Frank’s current trip to India sounds very suspicious to me. Why had nobody ever heard of this trip before? And if it was truly a inspection review, why didn’t Jiko Luveni go? Is anyone aware of Frank’s real state of physical and mental health these days? I wonder if the Indian Hospital in question has any psychiatric ward? Or do they have a treatment for guilty conscience insomnia, or “kalou ni draki”, or some of the other Fijian curse diseases?