Niko: Sack SOE
OPPOSITION MP Niko Nawaikula told Parliament that instead of “wasting time” bringing “a trifecta of laws” in relation to voters and elections into the House, Attorney-General Aiyaz SayedKhaiyum should sack the Supervisor of Elections.
“There are about three cases that the courts have stated that the Supervisor of Elections has been wrong but he is still sitting there; he should be out and first, I call upon him, ‘Please, get out’,”
Mr Nawaikula said during debate on the Interpretation (Amendment) Bill 2021.
“Get someone else useful, someone who knows the law because that is what the Chief Justice said, that you in your position, you should know what the law is.
“You interpreted that wrongly by causing the termination of my position here (in Parliament) and he acted unlawfully.
“The right thing for the Honourable Minister to do was to sack him, instead of bringing all these three amendments that we have to engage here, standing up here and waste our time debating, then another day on Wednesday, and in the process denying the right of the public to participate in the lawmaking process.
“It is not simple, there is a difficulty here, if I can just refer you to the explanatory notes.
“It says, ‘the birth, death and marriage registration seeks to amend section 11 of the Act to permit the mother of the child born alive or stillborn in Fiji to register the child and to give her equal status as that of the father of the child’.
“It is not as simple as that.
What will be the impact of this to the VKB (Vola ni Kawa Bula)?
“What will be the impact of this to the culture of the iTaukei, which should be reflected in the maintenance registered in the VKB.”
Mr Sayed-Khaiyum said the names of people registered under the VKB would stay there forever – whatever name they were registered under.
“So there are all those provisions that have been taken into account because we do not want to create any sort of conundrum as a result of this,” the A-G said.