Roots of iTaukei fears
Timoci Gaunavinaka, Nausori
When Fiji declared independence on October 10th, 1970 our people looked forward with enthusiasm to a nation that will boom with development, progress and prosperity.
For the following few years, Fiji recorded the highest economic growth in its history then. Businesses thrived and the nation progressed economically.
But in the shadow of this progress during that era, a cancerous cell of envy, jealousy and racism started to grow. It was triggered by the unequal distribution of wealth, financial disparity on ethnic lines and our cultural inequality in progressing academically and economically.
Neither the colonial Government, nor the Alliance Government that ruled Fiji for the first 16 years of independence had put any serious focus on this issue nor did they have any interest in carrying out in-depth research to find the root cause and solve it. So ethnically we walked down on two separate paths. Indo-Fijians worked in the cane belt and focused on running businesses and thrived. We iTaukei focussed on holding on to our culture and traditions, and getting a job. Eventually we dominated the civil service.
But the buying power of a civil service job was never comparable to the buying power of a businessman. While civil servants have limited vacancies and confined salary ceilings, business people have unlimited opportunities for expansion and therefore no ceilings for making money.
The Indo-Fijians continue to thrive economically and shared ideas on how to progress financially, while we iTaukei stuck to our culture and tradition and arrogantly heaped praises on the few of our people who manage to secure high salary jobs. Neither the Alliance Government nor the Great Council of Chiefs (GCC) then saw it necessary or as a priority to train and instill the skills of entrepreneurship in the minds of our iTaukei people.
They were so content with being served as elites knowing that their descendants are secure as long as our tradition and culture remains. Chiefs will always remain chiefs and commoners will always remain commoners and chiefs will always lead. They did not know that this assumption was attached to a ticking time bomb. Exposure, education, upcoming technologies and an evolving world will soon change the structures of iTaukei leadership forever.
We are not alone in these changes and evolution. In the last 250 years, many kingdoms have become republics and colonies have gained their Independence as sovereign states.
For our people to actually thrive, entrepreneurship is the key, but not the absolute solution. If we fail in business once or twice, it does not mean that we have failed in life. It simply means that there are lessons to be learnt from those failures and if we make necessary adjustments, we will eventually thrive. We must carefully and correctly analyse our failures and do what is right.
Many Indo-Fijians are willing to assist us iTaukei in building our businesses or as partners but the many decades of economic disparity has hatched an egg of mistrust towards them and further nurtured by our cultural diversity.
The 1987 and 2000 coups were repercussions of such a process increasing the political polarisation of our two main ethnic communities.
But instead of admitting and learning from our own iTaukei failures and despite running the government for 35 of our first 36 years of independence (1970 to 2006) some of our people still try to carefully cook up a falsified explanation.
They convince our grassroots iTaukei people that the innocent IndoFijians and Chinese were the culprits whether the issue is economy, land, business, governance or management. Many of us swallowed this hook, line and sinker. .
They brainwash them to see “Good Governance” and “Good Management” as signs of greed. Our carefree style of “Vakasabusabu” is embraced and compared to biblical “Love”. The deceitful misuse of our community funds (for the Village, Vanua, School or Church) and mismanagement of our various community projects are openly tolerated sometimes justifying them with various biblical verses on “forgiveness”.
Over consumption of kava resulting into laziness is sometimes interpreted as an obligation to the “vanua” and its culture and tradition.
As a race, we iTaukei have huge advantages over all other ethnic groups in Fiji.
Yet some of us prefer to act as judges with one eye that can delicately scrutinise and analyse the faults and actions of other races while closing the eye that should see the failures of our own making. Only we can amend or adjust that. No one else can.