December 8, 2009
When Mohammed Aziz recently confirmed that FMF personnel were getting a backdated “ration allowance” entitlement covering the period 2006-2008, he didn’t tell the whole truth.
Quoted by Fiji Village in a news item dated 25 November 2009, Aziz refused to say how much the payout involved. In fact, the total payout has been estimated at more than $7-million.
Needless to say, Aziz called it a ‘ration allowance” to disguise its true purpose, which was to make FMF personnel feel better about supporting Frank Bainimarama’s illegal dictatorship.
That’s why our Fiji freedom blogs refer to this ‘ration allowance” as “blood money” or “conscience money”.
The other fact that Colonel Aziz chose not to reveal was that the “ration allowance” is only the tip of a very big allowance iceberg.
In fact, a total of 11 “allowances” are gazetted for FMF personnel.
We know this because three days before the abrogation of the Constitution, when we had a relatively free media, Fiji Village published a list of gazetted allowances in a news item dated 7 April 2009 under the headline, “Military Allowances on hold”.
The other allowances are: Field Allowance, Seagoing Allowance, Remote Location Allowance, Explosive Allowance, Diving Allowance, Transfer Allowance, Hotel Meal Allowance, Sevusevu Allowance(!), Transport Allowance and Leave Allowance.
This very revealing piece of information has long been pulled from the Fiji Village website, but not before it was spotted by the sharp-eyed Discombobulated Bubu, who downloaded the news item and emailed it to FDN.
The questions the Fiji Village news item raises are: how much are these allowances, who are they paid to and on what pretext?
For example, will the dictator claim “Remote Location Allowance” when he is in faraway Copenhagen, or was he using his “Sevusevu Allowance” to formally welcome himself back home when he drank himself into a stupor in Traps in the wee hours of Friday 21 November?
We know that officially recorded expenditure by our military has blown out by nearly 50 per cent since the coup three years ago.
But, until the dictator and his cronies are finally brought to book, we will never know how much taxpayer money has been creamed off under the pretext of various “allowance” entitlements.
Folks, don’t forget that our former government was right onto Bainimarama over the way he abused his position as Commander of the RFMF by using it to create his own secret gravy train.
Now that’s Frank’s in charge, the gravy train is at full throttle.
But he and Colonel Aziz know only to well that what they are doing is criminal. That’s why they keep trotting out the absurd lie that their gravy train is only delivering “allowances” to which they are entitled.
And for playing his part, Aziz gets bumped up to Brigadier.
Such is life (for some) on Frank’s corrupt gravy train.
Fiji Democracy Now
Posted by rawfijinews
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Hard road ahead for Fiji!
December 8, 2009
Quite right JB and qasex.But these arguments and comments assume that Frank and his thugs are interested in the progress of Fiji while they are wholly consumed by self interest. And while a few of these so-called officers may have had a dinner or two at Sandhurst or Duntroon they cannot be described as scholar soldiers. Otherwise they would recognise the lessons of history.
Go back to the much trumpeted People’s Charter. What do we hear of it now? At that time it seemed the junta wanted to build a Suharto-style state with the charter as their Pancasila or national philosophy which quite simply meant that the army ran everything from the civil service to the media to the business life of the nation.
That has certainly happened. The army now runs the country, the media, the civil service, even the stock exchange (and poor old FHL)through a corrupted reserve bank which now offers tragically unrealistic growth projections. It’s a lie. They know it’s a lie (or should know). The people of Fiji know it’s a lie. The outside world knows it’s a lie. Wadan Narsey’s latest analysis is relevant here.
The question now is what happens when the money runs out? Even if the military manages to steal the FNPF funds – which seems likely – it won’t sustain their mad spending. The junta probably fondly imagines that there’s $2bn there to be had. But it’s just not so. That money represents investments, not cash, and those investments sit there valued as book assets. To liquidate them in a hurry there would be a fire sale with all that that entails. Oh sure, they could insist that book values are realised through control of public money but that’s a pass the parcel game and when the music stops, what then?
The plain fact is that Fiji’s treasure – financial, social and political – is being squandered by a bunch of thieves.
It will only end when there is no more money to be stolen by which time the businesses who for their survival have come around to the junta will have transferred every cent they can to their increasingly attractive offshore entities.
It’s grim prospect. The junta will use more and more public money to prop up “friendly” businesses such as the proposed TV station, making the classic mistake of thinking that because it’s in the media people will see, hear, read it and believe it.
It reminds me of when in my trade union days I went on a fraternal visit to Soviet Russia when one of the samizdat (pre-internet underground papers much like this site which I was not supposed to read) put it so succinctly: They pretend to tell us and we pretend to know. Is this Fiji’s future – a regime disconnected from the people it purports to serve? Sadly, it seems to be so.
For who will stand up against the guns? Not the business community whose interest, rightly in my view, is to carry on employing people while making the most of a bad situation. Certainly not the body politic which is divided as ever and cowed by fear of violence. Not now the media which is silenced by censorship, willingly in a number of quite disgraceful cases. And certainly not the warrior race who have become rabbits in the headlights.
Then who? The answer probably is the money. For when it runs out, which it will sooner than the goons think, who will pay those 4,000 squaddies? Not China, that’s for sure.
If there’s a scholar left in the MC he or she would do well to re-read Niccolo Machiavelli’s remark that there are no unpaid loyal people. There’s a hard road ahead for Fiji.
Posted by rawfijinews
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Paul Reeves needs a reality check
December 7, 2009
Commonwealth Special Representative to Fiji Sir Paul Reeves needs to take a more realistic look at what is happening in Fiji.
He is calling on New Zealand to change its hard line foreign policy stance on Fiji, to lift off travel bans and to re-engage with a military government that is stubborn, insensitive and repressive.
His simplistic view of the Fiji situation is discouraging to say the least to us in Fiji who are forced to live daily with human rights repressions in the form of severe restrictions on freedom of expression and media rights and the inability to openly comment on government policies that are devastating the lives of our people.
The PER is used to curb any form of resistance or dissent. Arbitrary arrests and brutalization of anyone who dares to raise a voice of dissent is the order of the day. There are reports of cane farmers being subjected to abuses like old men made to run around the army camp in the mid-day heat, even violent assaults, from army personnel while they have been cruelly marginalized from their own industry.
The economy is in deep trouble, unemployment high and the cost of living continues to spiral out of control. Insensitive government policies such as allowing bus fare increases and the removal of some 140-odd items from price control will send more of our struggling poor to the poverty heap.
Government fees and charges on services to the public have spiralled within a year to meet the requirements of a severely cash-strapped administration. While the country is going to the dogs, the prime minister is having a grand time trotting the globe on any pretext he can jerk up … he is barely in the country these days!
Despite all the spin about clamping down on corruption, the dictator, his close ministers and senior military officers are reportedly as much on the take as those they earlier denounced.
Paul Reeves needs to start looking behind the rhetoric being spewed out by the dictator and his henchmen to see where actually Fiji is headed on the third anniversary of the December 2006 takeover. In three years, the situation in the country has worsened, the future looks even more bleak.
He wants New Zealand, and no doubt the Commonwealth, to enter into dialogue with a man who is illogically stubborn, and refusing to move an inch in considering an acceptable and realistic timeline to return Fiji to democracy and constitutional rule.
Is Sir Paul trying to tell the international community and the people of Fiji that it will take five years to carry out reforms and hold general elections? Is he telling the world that only Frank Bainimarama and his cohorts in the military council know what is right for Fiji?
As the Comsec’s Special Representative to Fiji, Sir Paul’s first responsibility is to uphold the values and principles of the Commonwealth re-iterated last week in the Trinidad Tobago Affirmation of the Values and Principles of the Commonwealth.
Comsec might one to re-think whether Sir Paul has not comprised himself as his Special Representative to Fiji to help it chart a way out of its current political crisis.
If anything, the international community needs to take a reality check of the current Fiji situation and stop pussy-footing with our future. Sanctions need to be stepped up to force the dictator to a more realistic roadmap to return Fiji to democracy and to get rid of the repugnant Public Emergency Regulations.
Posted by rawfijinews
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Frank’s goons racist at heart by calling Brij Lal a “turncoat girmit baini” and Warden Narsey as an “Uncle Tom Indian”
December 7, 2009
After threats and violence comes ugly racism as the favoured weapon for Bainimarama’s goons
The dictator makes a big deal of justifying his rape of democracy by telling the United Nations and international TV audiences that it’s all about creating racial unity.
But his message has yet to reach his hard-line supporters.
On a daily basis they are exposing Frank’s pious posturing on racial unity as the cynical lie we have always known it to be.
Tune into Bainimarama’s rusted-on disciples, specifically the goons in Media Cell who venture onto the freedom blogs to espouse the regime’s cause, and you’ll know exactly what we are talking about.
In their efforts to refute the damning facts about Bainimarama and his regime, they are stirring the racist pot for all they are worth.
A ready example can be found in the comments posted against articles on Fiji freedom blogger, Coup Four And A Half.
In a commendable display of democracy and free speech, the blog has a policy of not blocking pro-regime comments, no matter how offensive, illogical and racist they may be.
Recently, the blog ran articles by Professors Waden Narsey and Brij Lal, each one a sharp and telling critique that exposed the incompetence and falsehoods that are the hallmarks of Bainimarama’s dictatorship.
The two articles sparked a minor fury of postings by the Media Cell goons.
But instead of mounting well constructed arguments against the two academics, they chose instead to wallow in the gutter of racism and make an issue of Narsey and Lal’s ethnicity.
“Turncoat Girmit Baini Brij Lal” is what one goon posted, blogging as “Anonymous”. A second anonymous poster described Narsey and Lal as “two Uncle Tom Indians”.
But who’s surprised by the fact that the regime’s supporters are so ready to play the racist card?
Most of them are drawn from the ranks of the RFMF, which is 99 per cent ethnic Fijian, making it the nation’s most manifestly racist institution.
And how does that fact square with the dictator’s holier-than-thou public utterances?
The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t. But achieving racial unity has never been on the dictator’s real agenda.
Like “cleaning up corruption” the “racial unity” platform is another example of spin cranked up by Frank Bainimarama to conceal his true purpose in life, which is gaining protection from due process.
You know folks, we almost feel grateful to Frank’s racist attack dogs!
After all, they are playing no small part in helping the wider world to fully grasp the unsavoury truth about a despicable dictator who is relentlessly destroying our beloved nation.
Fiji Democracy Now
Posted by rawfijinews
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Fiji’s inflation rate expected at 15.2% and not Sada Reddy’s blatant lie of 7%
December 7, 2009 The Reserve Bank is way off the mark in its inflation forecasts which is likely to be running closer to an unprecedented high of 15.2% and not the RBF-claimed 7%.
Likewise, to claim that devaluation of the Fiji dollar has resulted in benefits to the economy is a horrendous misrepresentation. In fact, devaluation has not benefited the economy. Nor has it enhanced Fiji’s Foreign Reserves.
The practice worldwide is to express Reserves in one of the globally accepted international currencies. The US dollar is the most commonly used currency in this respect. Devaluation of the Fiji dollar by 20% last April resulted in the depreciation of our currency vis a vis the US dollar. Thus, our reserves received an artificial boost but the in actual fact there was no change in our foreign reserves position when measured in US dollars or in the currencies of our major trading partners.
All our imports are paid for in foreign currency, largely in Australian, NZ, US dollars or the Japanese Yen. The net effect of the devaluation, therefore, is that more Fiji dollars will now be needed to settle our import bills in these foreign currencies. Devaluation will also add to the burden of servicing our foreign currency debts. Over a longer period, it will have done more harm than good to the economy.
The argument that devaluation has increased our competitiveness in the international market place is of little significance if we look at what we export. Hardly any of our exports would have benefited from the devaluation. Not even the tourism sector. With its heavily discounted rates, tourism is not likely to bring in any enhanced earnings. Indeed, tourism receipts for 2009 are estimated by official sources to be significantly below that of 2008.
On the other hand, devaluation has inflicted greater hardship on the local people. It has resulted in galloping inflation as prices of virtually every thing went up significantly, hitting the poor amongst us the hardest. As a direct consequence of the devaluation rub off, traders and vendors of local goods and services also jacked up their prices. These increased prices are way above any increase one would expect from a 20% devaluation.
It is obvious that the business community has taken undue advantage of the devaluation to send prices skyrocketing
The claim therefore that inflation is “currently running at around 7% and will moderate at around 2% by the end of 2010” is absolutely ridiculous. Ask anyone on the street and he/she will tell you that prices of almost everything have soared beyond belief since devaluation.
A recent survey by the Consumer Council of Fiji revealed that prices of many items in daily use in every household had gone up by 100% and, in some cases, by as much as 200%.
So where does the 7% inflation rate fit in? In the past three months bus fares and electricity rates have gone up. So has the price of fuel. Food, energy and transport are the major components of the Consumer Price Index. When prices have doubled or even trebled how can the RBF talk about 7% inflation rate? It is laughable.
With the removal of price controls as announced in the 2010 Budget, inflation is going to worsen. A weak economy and a subdued export sector will exert more pressure on the dollar and likely further erode its purchasing power.
So to be more accurate inflation is more likely to be running in double digits rather than the 7% and 2% projected by the Reserve Bank.
It would be a lot more palatable if the RBF were to admit the truth rather than engage in vain attempts to paint a bright picture of a bleak scenario. – Fiji Labour Party
From Raw Fiji News Blog: An expert view.http://rawfijinews.wordpress.com/
“The Commonwealth Conversation began in July 2009. Over the course of the past six months, we have heard much which gives us reason for concern, but more which gives us reason to hope. Above all, we have heard criticism and ideas which we believe can be used to construct a stronger Commonwealth for the future. Now, we are pulling together our final recommendations and a report which we will publish in early March. “
Who should be in the Eminent Persons Group? 
