Pasifika Talanoa by a traveled ITaukei Fijian

We are living through an age of calculation.

In one corner of the world, the US President sits across from his Chinese counterpart. For the last thirty-six hours, they were discussing trade, tariffs, and Taiwan. Yet humming beneath every exchange—the elephant that fills the room without ever being named—is West Asia’s bleeding. No one expects morality to interrupt power. No one is surprised.

In another corner, Australia’s Foreign Minister landed in Fiji, cheque in hand, an energy reprieve as the offering. The message is not subtle: We are still the premier power in the Pasifika. Meanwhile, Fiji’s Prime Minister meets Papua New Guinea’s leadership at the inaugural Melanesian Ocean Summit in Port Moresby. The other elephant—the plight of West Papua, its people gasping under Indonesian watch—fades further into silence. Not because it has been forgotten, but because Indonesia is watching. Realpolitik does not forget; it simply prioritises.

And then there is Fiji itself.

The Constitutional Reform Commission now travels to the maritime islands, gathering voices. What emerges from those consultations is not merely a debate about legal clauses or individual rights. It is a raw confrontation between two competing logics: the logic of realpolitik and the logic of what we might call idealpolitik.

The urban elite—educated, connected, comfortable—argue for individual rights as the centrepiece of any new constitution. They speak the language of Western liberal democracy: equality before the law, the erasure of ethnic distinctions, the triumph of the citizen over the communal self. They point to the 2013 Constitution, which made “Fijian” a term for all citizens, and they call it progress.

But among the majority iTaukei—especially those outside the urban centres—this is not progress. It is erasure.

For the iTaukei, the term “Fijian” was, is, and will always belong to the first people of this land. The 2013 Constitution did not unify; it dispossessed—of land and of identity. The Bose Levu Vakaturaga (BLV) was removed, not reformed. A cultural and political architecture that had stood for generations, was simply erased. In its place came a single, flattening word: Fijian for everyone.

The iTaukei response, framed in the language of realpolitik, is brutally simple: Power asymmetry must be addressed first.

Why? Because the numbers tell a story our urban elite would rather not read. The iTaukei make up 75 percent of Fiji’s poverty population. Village housing—the foundation of iTaukei communal life—has been left to rot by successive governments, tourist-board images of smiling, happy villagers, notwithstanding. Native lands are leased out under Unimproved Capital Value (UCV) arrangements that ensure landowners receive a pittance in lease payments, while tenants build mansions on these same UCV’d lands. Freehold landowners, meanwhile, face no such shackles; only iTaukei landowners who lease their lands are bound this way. Add to this the cascading crises of drugs, HIV, and non-communicable diseases—all disproportionately affecting iTaukei communities—and the picture becomes impossible to ignore.

The idealpolitik response is to say: These are class issues, not ethnic ones. A bill of individual rights will lift everyone.

But the iTaukei no longer believe this. Their scepticism is not irrational. It is the hard-won wisdom of people who have been “used and abused”—who have seen their identity reduced to a tourism slogan, their institutions dismantled in the name of unity, their material conditions ignored while others prospered.

In realpolitik terms, the iTaukei are now playing the only game that makes sense: they are naming their national interest. And they are saying, bluntly, that Fiji cannot become one nation until the foundational asymmetry between its indigenous people and everyone else is resolved. Not papered over. Not celebrated in cultural performances. Resolved.

The urban elite call this divisive. The iTaukei call it honest.

Consider the parallel with geopolitics. The United States does not raise West Papua with Indonesia because the relationship matters more than the principle. Australia does not mention it because its strategic calculus in the Pasifika runs through Jakarta. And Fiji and PNG, sitting together in Port Moresby, say nothing because to speak is to risk.

That is realpolitik: what works, not what is right.

The iTaukei are now asking whether Fiji’s urban elite are any different. Are they not, too, practising a form of realpolitik—one that preserves a constitution they benefit from, that protects individual rights precisely because those rights do not threaten their own power? Calling it “idealism” does not make it so. Idealism that refuses to see material suffering, is merely privilege dressed up as principle.

The question facing Fiji is not whether to choose between power and principle. The question is: whose power, and whose principle?

For the iTaukei, the way forward is clear. Restore the BLV to its rightful place. Recognise that “Fijian” belongs to the first people. Address land leases so that native owners are not perpetual tenants in their own domain, receiving only a pittance. And do all of this not as a gift, but as a precondition for any genuine national stability.

Without this, the idealpolitik of individual rights will ring hollow. A constitution that makes everyone legally equal while iTaukei villages decay, iTaukei bodies suffer from preventable disease, and iTaukei children grow up in poverty—that is not unity. That is a formula for slow-burning resentment.

The world watches as superpowers choose pragmatism over justice in West Papua. Fiji has the chance to choose differently—not by abandoning pragmatism, but by recognising that true pragmatism begins at home, with the people who have been waiting the longest.

The tensions we feel are not abstract. They are the tensions between those who have been heard and those who have not; between those who benefit from the way things are and those who can no longer afford to wait.

Who are we? We are a nation standing at the edge of a choice: continue the realpolitik of silence, or embrace a different kind of realism—one that understands that a nation which ignores the cry of its first people will never, in the end, be stable.

The elephant in Fiji’s room has a name. It is time to speak it.

Two weeks ago, I posted a video. It showed what anyone driving past the Naboro Prison junction can see with their own eyes: plastic bottles wedged into highway drains, food wrappers tangled in grass, rubbish breeding in full view of prisoners, Corrections personnel, commuters, and families.

I have been watching to see if it would trigger a positive reaction. This morning, I drove that same road again. Alas, nothing had changed. The garbage continues to pile up. And there, walking along the shoulder, were prisoners under the watch of a Corrections officer. Across the drain—overflowing with garbage—people waited at the bus stop. No one looked at the drain. No one seemed to notice. Or if they did, they had already perfected the Fijian art of looking away.

We are good at that. Very good.

The law with teeth, and our habit of silence

Fiji’s new parental liability law for littering is bold. It says parents can be fined or given community service when their children discard rubbish. On paper, it has teeth. But a law only bites when someone points at what needs chewing. And that is where we fail as neighbours.

We see a prisoner walking past filth. We see a bus stop beside a reeking drain. We watch a Corrections officer lead a chain of able-bodied men past a mess they could clean in an hour, max. We are not cruel people. We are not lazy in our own homes. But in public spaces, we have developed a peculiar, quiet thoughtlessness—a habit of assuming that someone else will care.

Who is the “someone else”?

At Naboro, the “someone else” is conveniently everyone. The Fiji Corrections Service has prisoners who need purpose and rehabilitation. Cleaning their own roadside would teach more than any anger management class. The residents who wait at that bus stop—can they not see the potential health hazard to their families? And Corrections officers—can they not see the same hazard for those in their custody?

But we don’t act. Because thoughtlessness often masks itself as politeness. So we breathe the hazard instead.

The law alone will not save us

The Minister for Environment said we are all custodians. But custodianship is not a government portfolio. It is the small, undramatic act of bending down and doing what is right there on your doorstep—for all and sundry to see.

Education, fines, and even shame have their place. But before any of that works, we must admit our own role in the silence. Every time we see rubbish and do nothing, we teach the child beside us that litter is tolerable.

A movement, not a mandate

The parental litter law is not flawed. It is unfinished. It gives us a tool, but we are the hand that must wield it. That means asking the Corrections Service, publicly and politely, why their able workforce is not being deployed to their own junction. That means bus stop commuters refusing to wait in silence beside a health hazard.

Fiji’s beauty is not automatic. It is an act of daily will. And right now, at the Naboro Prison junction, our will is on holiday. Let us call it home—not with shame, but with the quiet, firm thoughtfulness we have misplaced for too long.

The rubbish will not disappear by magic. It will disappear when we stop pretending it is someone else’s problem.

“The journey is long, the arc of righteousness with curve.”

This simple yet profound saying captures a truth deeply understood by the itaukei. The path of a people is never a straight line; it bends, it weaves, it sometimes retreats before advancing. From the vantage of the Bose Levu Vakaturaga (BLV); whose modern incarnation carries a very different burden than its predecessor, this curved arc of righteousness offers a powerful lens through which to understand indigenous aspirations, especially when those aspirations may not be fulfilled in our own lifetime.

Two Councils, Two Eras: From Open Politics to Intergenerational Custody

To speak of the BLV today is to acknowledge a profound transformation. The old BLV, openly supported political parties, endorsed candidates, and was deeply entangled in Fiji’s volatile politics. It was not merely a customary body; it was a political actor, wielding considerable influence. That era brought some victories for itaukei interests, but it also brought division, controversy, and a gradual erosion of the BLV’s moral authority in the eyes of many.

The BLV of today, reinstated in 2023 after years of abolition, has learned from that curved arc. Its mandate is no longer to back prime ministers or sway elections. Instead, its work is quieter, deeper, and far longer in its horizon: to ensure intergenerational prosperity for the itaukei—prosperity that may not be seen or measured within the lifetime of any chief sitting in Council today.

This shift from open politics to intergenerational stewardship is not a retreat from power; it is a redefinition of it. The old BLV sought victories in election cycles. The new BLV plants trees under whose shade it knows it will never sit.

The Long Journey: Memory, Loss, and a Patience Beyond Politics

For the itaukei, the journey began long before colonial maps or constitutional crises. It began with the first canoes, the settlement of our islands and the establishment of the mataqali bound by love and mutual care. That journey has included moments of great mana—the Deed of Cession, the protection of itaukei land. But it has also included painful curves: the erosion of chiefly protocols, the temporary abolition of the BLV itself and the quiet struggle to maintain identity in a globalising world.

The old BLV responded to these curves by entering the political arena directly—backing parties, making endorsements, seeking immediate influence. But that approach, however well-intentioned, proved curved in its own way: it brought short-term gains but long-term instability, including the Council’s own abolition in 2012.

The new BLV, drawing from that hard lesson, now understands a deeper truth: intergenerational prosperity cannot be secured by election cycles. A land-use policy that benefits a single generation may impoverish the next. A constitutional clause that favours one political alliance may be repealed by another. True prosperity for the Vanua (land, people, custom) requires decisions whose fruits will be harvested by grandchildren and great-grandchildren—people not yet born, whose faces the chiefs will never see.

The Arc of Righteousness with Curve: Why We May Not See Its Bending

The quote speaks of “righteousness”—not justice alone, but something deeper. In the itaukei worldview, righteousness is correctness woven into veilomani (compassion), veidokai (respect), and veiyaloni (reconciliation). A righteous society is one where the Vanua is in balance: where qoliqoli are shared, where kerekere (customary requesting) functions without exploitation, where the yavusa cares for its vulnerable.

But why “with curve”? Because the path to righteousness is rarely direct. And crucially, from the perspective of the new BLV, the most important curves may bend so slowly that no living person will see them straighten.

Consider three examples of work the current Council is undertaking—work whose results belong to another era:

1. Climate resilience for coastal villages: The BLV today advocates for the managed relocation of itaukei communities threatened by rising seas. The policies, funding agreements, and customary protocols being negotiated now may take thirty years to fully implement. The chiefs who sign those agreements will likely be dead before the last family moves safely to higher ground. That is intergenerational work.

2. Protection of iTaukei intellectual property: The Council is quietly supporting legal frameworks to protect masi (tapa) designs, traditional navigation knowledge, and medicinal plant lore from commercial exploitation. These protections may not bear fruit—may not stop a single overseas counterfeit—for a decade or more. The chiefs sitting today may never read a court ruling in their favour. Yet they work.

3. Revitalisation of endangered dialects: Nearly a dozen iTaukei dialects are losing fluent speakers. The BLV’s current efforts to document them, integrate them into school curricula, and support elder-to-youth transmission will not restore those dialects in five years—or even in twenty. The arc bends so slowly that only the grandchildren of today’s youth may once again speak their village’s original tongue freely. But the bending begins now.

Aspirations That Transcend a Single Lifetime

What do itaukei people aspire to? From the new BLV’s perspective, the answer cannot be “power in the next election.” It must be:

· Sovereignty of custom: That vakaturaga be respected as a living legal and ethical system, not as a political pawn.

· Land as identity: That meaningful decision-making over iTaukei lands, forests, and waters returns to the mataqali and yavusa—even if that return takes half a century of legal and constitutional advocacy.

· Cultural continuity: That every itaukei child, a hundred years from now, knows their yavusa, their mataqali, and their vasu (maternal ties)—even if no living chief today will see that fully realised classroom.

· Unity without political division: That the itaukei people find common cause across provinces and clans, not through a political party endorsed by chiefs, but through shared commitment to a seven-generation horizon.

Why We Will Not See It—And Why That Is the Point

The old BLV sought results it could see: an election won, a minister appointed, a budget allocated. Those results were real, but they were also fleeting. Governments fall. Alliances shift. What one Parliament grants, another can revoke.

The new BLV has accepted a harder truth: the most important work is the work we will never witness. A replanted mangrove forest that protects a village from cyclones in 2070—planted by chiefs who will be bones in the ground by then. A land trust structure that prevents alienation for centuries—designed by men and women who will never collect its dividends. A generation of itaukei lawyers and elders who can recite customary law as fluently as statute—educated under programmes initiated by a Council that will not be there to see them graduate.

This is the “curve” in its deepest sense. The arc of righteousness bends away from immediate gratification, away from political headlines, away from the ego of “I did this.” It bends instead toward a future that the present generation will only glimpse. And that is precisely what makes it righteous.

Conclusion

For the itaukei, the Bose Levu Vakaturaga is no longer a political machine. It is a covenant across time—a body that has learned from its own history of open politics and chosen instead the harder, quieter path of intergenerational prosperity. The journey is long. The arc curves. And we, the living, will not see its completion.

But that does not mean it does not bend.

From the chiefly house before the yaqona (kava), the elders nod not for themselves, but for the ones who will come after. Our possessions will pass away—as long as the people of the land thrive.