Can the man who led the first coup help Fiji regain what was lost

A year ago today on Christmas Eve, 2022, Sitiveni Rabuka was sworn in as prime minister of Fiji, returning to the role he first won democratically in 1992. To mark the anniversary of this occasion we are releasing the final two episodes of our series reCoup, which examines what it will take for Fiji to regain what was lost after successive coup d'etat.

In part one of reCoup we focused on the incredible success of the Fijian Drua.

As this episode highlighted, Fiji’s potential to be a truly competitive force in international rugby is much more realistic, now that it has a Super rugby franchise.

But what we also showed was the impact the Drua is having on the country as a whole, as it’s helping grow the economy and unite people around a common passion.

Watch part one of reCoup below:

But even casual observers of Fijian politics will know that this nation has had more than its fair share of disunity, due to four de-stabilising coup d’etat over the last 36 years.

For Rabuka to be the person to emerge as the new prime minister on 24 December carries extra significance, given he instigated the first two coups in 1987. What is also striking is that the multi-racial, three-party coalition he now leads appears to be quite different to the type of government he was attempting to support in the 1980s.

Watch part two of reCoup below:

Rabuka himself has repeatedly made the case over the last three decades that what he did was wrong and he has rebuilt relationships with the Indian community both in Fiji and around the world.

But regardless of how his personal stance has changed, the coups he initiated were a trigger for succeeding leaders to emulate his approach and continue to use force or the threat of military action to seize political power rather than win it democratically.

Watch part three of reCoup below:

'As the world should be'

What makes Fiji’s political history so tragic, is that for those who know Fiji, they also know it has the potential to be a truly great nation.

As one of our interviewees, Reverend Atu Lagi said when trying to explain what the country was like before the coup, he kept coming back to this phrase, “it was as the world should be”.

But this has nothing to do with its stunning beauty or incredible natural resources, rather because of the purveying spirit of harmony that can exist between people in Fiji, when they cast aside their differences.

Click below to listen to this series as a podcast:

And this is why we named this three-part series reCoup.

Recoup means to regain something that was lost and over these episodes we have examined what it will take for Fiji to be a place where all who love it, feel belonging.

Both myself and Eroti Navuku, the Director of Photography for this series, were born in Fiji. Eroti is iTaukei, while my ancestors came to Fiji in the late 1800s to be indentured labours in the sugarcane fields.

For myself, I particularly wanted to better understand the history of a country I've spent so many years away from, having left in November 1987.

When the first coup happened, our home in Suva was only minutes from where hordes of angry crowds raged through the city. But my younger brother and I would have been obliviously playing as these dramatic events unfolded.

And the irony of it all was that my dad, who was working at the Reserve Bank at the time, would happen to meet Rabuka at an after-work kava session only a week after this momentous upheaval and the pair traded a respectful handshake. So clearly Rabuka’s actions weren’t fuelled by a deep racial hatred.

We would leave Fiji six months later, and as a five-year-old I felt like I’d been ripped away from a home I truly loved, but for whatever reason our family spoke little of the circumstances surrounding our departure.

The successive coup in 2000 was led by a Suva Grammar classmate of my dad’s, George Speight and Frank Baininarama’s coup was supported by some of my family’s friends. Yet despite having some tenuous connections to these consequential figures, I’ve never felt like I understood the drivers of these massive moments in Fiji’s history.

Therefore, a big focus of this series was to try and get a one hour interview with Rabuka, to hear from the man himself about why he did the first coup, why he felt so compelled to apologise and how he plans to re-establish political stability in Fiji.

Unfortunately that one hour interview never happened. We have been in regular contact with his media team over the course of this year and when we went to Fiji, along with when Rabuka came to NZ, we had scheduled interview times. But both these interviews were cancelled due to last minute changes.

Of course that has been hugely frustrating, especially knowing he’s sat down with others from the media over this time and I hope in the future this is something we can revisit. However despite a number of sliding door moments to speak one-on-one, we were still able to get many of our questions answered during his visits to Wellington and Auckland.

But what came through in all our interviews for this series was that there is still a lingering sense of disquiet about whether this current period of stability can last. And what is clear to me is that the coups have created an underlying anxiety about whether Fiji’s political leaders will always act in the best interests of everyone.

So given this, perhaps Rabuka is the very person for this time, as he sowed the first seeds of distrust he can also be the one who can finally uproot these underlying fears that undermine Fiji’s potential to be the unified, cohesive society we all know it can be.

Justin Latif and Eroti Navuku travelled to Fiji courtesy of Pacific Cooperation Foundation.