No man rises alone
High school failure to postgraduate success
HE held his newborn daughter, kissed her on the head, and set off to New Zealand to pursue his PhD. Ilisoni Leweniqila made a difficult choice that day. Everything in him wished to remain by his wife’s side and keep his first child in his arms, but he had a calling and a duty to his country to honour it.
Years later, Dr Leweniqila is now the acting Associate Dean TVET at the Fiji National University and was reportedly the first Fijian to earn a PhD in horticulture. But the heartache he felt being away from his family in this pursuit was not the only thing to ever threaten to hold him back.
Dr Leweniqila was not naturally academically inclined. In fact, back in high school he was your typical fun-loving jock. The proud RKS (Ratu Kadavulevu School) alumnus used to represent his school in rugby and athletics and usually got the average marks in exams.
But this changed in Form 6 (Year 12). He failed his final exams.
Having been told, as most of us are, over and over of the importance of studying hard and shooting for a career in science, medicine, engineering; a young Ilisoni now felt lost.
“Being told that so many times, it became culture; it was wired into us,” he said.
But the young man decided one failure wouldn’t be the end of his story. Knowing many sports-leaning schools would take up his request to retake form 6 just for his rugby skills, he opted instead to go to Tailevu North Secondary.
But we aren’t all destined for lab coats and stethoscopes, and he failed again, returned to RKS and failed Form 6 a third time.
Only this time, he had taken up RKS’ vocational studies alongside retrying Form 6, and here, he finally found his calling.
Having spent his whole high school career waking at 3am and being out weeding and farming by 5am (as was expected of all RKS students back then), he remembered how much he had cherished those experiences and decided to take up agricultural engineering.
A year later, armed with a Certificate in Agricultural Engineering from FIT (the Fiji Institute of Technology in Ba, now part of FNU), he began his attachment with the Ministry of Agriculture.
Here, he met his greatest mentors. The senior officers who had been with the ministry for years took him under their wing and taught him what books couldn’t. The realities and gaps in local agriculture.
The young man had found a place he was valued and a way to give back to his country. Two years into this attachment, Principal Agricultural Officer, a Viliame Yabakivou suggested Ilisoni apply for a Bachelors Degree in Agriculture at USP (University of the South Pacific).
Suddenly it all came back to Ilisoni. His failures had left a self-doubt in him, and it was made worse by the image he’d made in his mind about USP only being for the elite, the academics, the ones that had spent their time in libraries when he’d been on the rugby field. He declined.
Mr Viliame’s faith in him, however, was unshaken. He encouraged Ilisoni to reach out to fellow aspiring academic, Naomi Tahuniai Naiqumu, and she became another catalyst: helping him through the application process.
Still, all along, all Ilisoni could think was, ‘USP will want that 250 on the form 6 results. They’ll just see mine and throw it.’
But he tried anyway.
On January 15, 2008, the USP Office of the Registrar sent a letter saying Ilisoni Leweniqila had been accepted into their Bachelor of Agriculture program, and thus began the academic journey that ultimately led to his 2023 graduation with a PhD from Massey University in New Zealand.
Despite attaining an impressive 4.0 GPA in his postgraduate studies, Dr Leweniqila hasn’t forgotten that there are more important things than the numbers on a report card.
“The teachers always said to become a nurse, a doctor, a scientist. But within agriculture we’ve got our own nurses, the agronomists; our own doctors in the crop protection section; our own soil scientists,” Dr Leweniqila told me only days ago, as he shared his story with me.
“GPA won’t necessarily solve food insecurity; GPA won’t solve climate change issues; knowledge will,” he said.
His perseverance through failures, his struggle to prove himself, his sacrifice when parting from his family; Dr Leweniqila believes this was all for the sake of bringing this much-needed knowledge back to Fiji.
“All this knowledge I gained from the professors in New Zealand, now it is here with me, and I can be a means of transferring that knowledge to the next generation,” he said.
As Dr Leweniqila proudly showed my colleagues and me around FNU’s crop and livestock farms and told us about the students who, like him, had found their calling toiling the land, I awoke to the crucial need for more educators like him.
Not only is Dr Leweniqila, through FNU, proving to countless youths that success isn’t only found through perfect grades and specific careers, he is also attempting to reconnect our people with our food and land.
I received an impromptu lecture about ethnobotany and social agriculture, the need to understand the social and cultural implications of cultivation, arming the people of Fiji with a means to attain better food security while also rekindling the deep traditional bonds our people have with our land and farms.
“I am so blessed to have great leaders here at Fiji National University who valued me after I returned from my PhD studies in New Zealand. At FNU we have leaders with vision and shared vision. Leaders who identified the potential that I had for the future generation and our communities in Fiji.
And all it took was for one man to be given a chance to succeed.
“Sega ni dua na turaga me tubu cake duadua,” he shared. No man rises alone.
“We rise with our people. And this is my way of giving back to the vanua.”
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