Kamikamica: Government fulfils several promises

WHILE the coalition Government managed to fulfil several promises it made during the campaign trail, Deputy Prime Minister Manoa Kamikamica understands more work is still left.

Speaking to this newspaper, Mr Kamikamica said while they had repealed controversial laws such as Bill 17, there were other things the Government was trying to do.

“In essence, we are looking at rebuilding the country after 16 years of virtual dictatorship, in the country,” he said.

“There’s a lot of things that we need to address in the country. One of the obvious ones is that there’s clearly a drug problem in Fiji. And the previous government has never disclosed it openly.

“You look at the extent of the drug discovery, and there’s never been a crackdown by the previous government. So, Fiji is now a major transit hub.”

He said similar woes plagued the health and education sectors, as there were multiple concerns about the state of hospitals and the woeful Year Eight results that shocked the nation.

“No matter whatever economic growth statistics there, the reality is that our hospitals and the medical situation in Fiji have been bad. And we’ve now started repairing some of the hospitals.

“There are plans for a new 100bed hospital through the Indian government. There will be plans to repair all other hospitals in the country.

“A lot of that is also being done in collaboration with the NGOs and donor governments. So, there’s a lot to be rebuilt. In the education system, we just had bad results with Year Eight.

“If you talk to the educators, they say that the curriculum has been chopped and changed too many changes. And worse still, they brought down the retirement age for teachers.

“All these things are part of a rebuilding process in the country.”

Mr Kamikamica said part of rebuilding the economy would be to continue diversifying the economy.

“You know, we’ve done some good things like bringing in Google into Fiji, that will transform the whole ICT technology, telecommunications industry.

“Overall, happy with what we’ve achieved. You always can do more. It would probably be fair to say that it wouldn’t all be done in four years. But certainly, we are taking very deliberate steps to fix the problems faced in the country.”