Is the interim cabinet about to implode?

When Frank Bainimarama overthrew Qarase’s government and then put together an interim cabinet featuring Mahen Chaudhry, you had to wonder whether the two men could work together without Qarase being in the picture. Chaudhry used to spit hell, wrath and fury at the military commander, accusing him of being responsible for the ‘real coup’ on 29 May 2000 (& calling Speight’s coup ten days earlier a mere dress rehearsal). It was common hostility to Qarase that drew Chaudhry and the military commander together. But with Qarase out of the picture it didnt taken long before the sparks started flying. The Suva journalists have, for the most part, not dared to cover this story. Around the cyberspace Yellow Bucket, people are able to be less cautious, especially after a bowl or two (& some hot stuff to chase).  On the information superhighway, none of us feel easily intimidated by Mahen Chaudhry, who is well known for being very free and easy with his threats against journalists (he instinctively dislikes them, … unless they parrot what he says).   

Chaudhry’s now in a double-blind, having told the Indian community that their low standards of living were due to corruption under Fijian leaders like Qarase, he now has to explain why they are even worse off under his own stewardship. For his big compromise with Bainimarama what has he got to offer? Well, truth up, he still has a fair old collection of portfolios in his own right (the big one being finance), but he can hardly claim to be accompanied by the cream that Fiji Indian politics has to offer. The deposed cabinet had star performers like Krishna Datt, Dr Gounder, the recently deceased Gyani Nand, Udit Narayan aand Chaitanya Lakshman whereas Chaudhry’s only other Labour ally in cabinet is Lekh Ram Vayeshnoi, who is making almost as bad a job of his sports portfolio as he did as minister of information back in 1999. Subtle politics is not his forte. Nor is man management …. but if you have a chinashop and need a bulldozer, well here’s your man! And the only other Indian minister in the military cabinet is Jainend Kumar, who has made such a mess at the Ministry of Agriculture that they had to send Major Neumi Leweni in to help him. Oh boyorboy! Imagine just how bad things must have been for anyone to think that someone like Neumi Leweni could actually improve the situation! Just the very thought of it makes us here, around the Yellow Bucket, need another bowl. takitaki!  

Indo-Fijian criticisms of the military government have increased of late, and many in the business community are realising that their initial hopes that the Bainimarama-led government would, as they said they would, ’clean up’ the country were way off the mark. Much of the clean up talk has vanished, with FICAC going into a long and well-deserved slumber except when men in green want to run the odd protection racket (‘You grease my palm, and I’ll get you off the clean-up hitlist’). Instead, the Commander now describes the coup objectives as being to get rid of racial politics. Whatever next? Maybe soon the text messages buzzing through on his mobile phone will tell him to start talking about environmental catastrophe, genocide or terrorism as the ‘real reasons’ for the coup. Maybe he can tour the world, with Aiyez Sayed-Kayum at his side, to persuade everyone that Darfur is actually a province of Fiji or that the coup was necessary in order to wipe out Kurdish militants hiding in the mountains. Hey, anything goes! This guy Aiyez sure is believable. He has us here around the Bucket completely convinced about everything; one and one is four, and mashed up lamb and pork make chicken.   

A few weeks ago, the coup leader talked about bringing back the military checkpoints in Suva and elsewhere to get down soaring crime levels. That was a comment aimed at the Indians, for whom the checkpoints were the best thing about Dec 5. If you spend your life living behind wire grills and put up with dogs on heat howling all night but still get burgled all the time, well that makes crime your No 1. issue.  And the military checkpoints had pretty much stopped it after the coup. But the reason Frank raised the checkpoints issue in September was not because of his concerns about crime (not much of a problem at his super secure Domain residence now that his feisty next door neighbour Mike Green has gone home to New Zealand), but because he knew his support from the Fiji Indians was flagging and this was the one super-popular thing he could fall back on. Frank even called in the new police commissioner, Esala Teleni, and told him to earn his pay rise by doing something pronto! about crime-levels, all in the hope of reviving flagging support in the Indian community. 

And its not only soaring crime levels, break-ins, murders of Indian taxi drivers and the old staple temple raids that have made the Indo-Fijians think long and hard about the coup. The ignorant thuggery of Bainimarama’s public statements recently, live on Fiji TV, have cast him in an increasingly poor light of late amongst the Indians, just as his offensive remarks about Fijian culture have triggered a strong reaction from the indigenous community. 

But getting back to the IG’s big claim that it is eliminating race from Fiji, the four hundred billion dollar question is can Frank get rid of racial politics in his own cabinet?This is why the Diwali firecrackers have recently been exploding in cabinet.  Everyone knows that Chaudhry is no great mate of Poseci Bune, and the two men have barely managed to publicly conceal their distaste for each other. After the 2006 election, they fell out badly – with Poseci (always the opportunist) participating in Qarase’s mulit-party cabinet and then jumping across to be a minister in the illegal coup regime, even if he all the time stuck close to his Gujerati mates up at Kundan Singh. But the frictions with Chaudhry are still there beneath the surface. Mahen was none too happy that he lost the public sector reform portfolio to his one-time deputy FLP leader, and the present office politics of the post-coup interim cabinet doesnt quite do it for him. He is still ill at ease amongst the Fijian ministers like the two Ratu Epelis, and cant quite communicate with the more blithering well-past-their-retirement-date ministers and mystics. Its not like the glory days in 1999 when Chaudhry could sort everything out via a cabal of trusted Indian allies at secret meetings in Suva’s suburbs and then scoot down to cabinet to get the Fijian ministers to rubber stamp everything he’d decided.    

As finance supremo, Mahen is also pissed about resistance to his efforts to reign in military spending, which bust all budgeted limits during the coup months.  

Did anyone notice that, when Frank Bainimarama went abroad to the UN in New York and to the Forum in Tonga it was not his supposed Deputy Prime Minister, Mahen Chaudhry, who acted as Prime Minister, but instead Ratu Epeli Nailatikau? There’s a good sign of how much confidence Frank has in his deputy.   

So what’s the money on Chaudhry jumping ship or getting the push? Down at the betting shop at Nabua they’ll give you good odds. Weeding the garden beds down at Suva Point might get a bit risky soon. Who knows maybe he’ll skip the country (if he isnt put on a travel ban) and take up that long-cuiltivated residence in India. Or maybe he will end up at the Hague, answering charges of rank hypocracy.  

Meanwhile, its not possible to revive that great old Yellow Bucket tradition without a word or two about our boys in France. What a performance! Crushing the Welsh and then nearly beating the boks. And each time just when the boys looked dead and buried, back they came. Even the line-out, terrible in some of the early games, got better as the competition got sharper. If only the politicians could play politics like that, Fiji would be the way the world should be.     

Till next week & Namaste bro and sis!