Biography of sakeasi butadroka

Sakiasi Iliesa Bakewa Butadroka (died 2 December 1999) was a Fijian politician noted for his strident ethnic nationalism. Originally elected to the House of Representatives as a member of the ruling Alliance Party in the parliamentary election of 1972, he was expelled from the Alliance for his public attacks against the presence of Persons of Indian origin (Indo-Fijians) in Fiji. He had introduced a parliamentary motion calling for a resolution stating: "That this House agrees that the time has arrived when Indians or people of Indian origin in this country be repatriated back to India and that their travelling expenses back home and compensation for their properties in this country be met by the British Government." The motion was unanimously rejected.

Butadroka founded the Fijian Nationalist Party, which took 24.4 percent of the vote in the general election held in March 1977. Although the party won only one parliamentary seat, its votes were mostly at the expense of the Alliance. This allowed the opposition National Federation Party to win a plurality, precipitating a constitutional crisis. Three days after the election he gave a speech at a public meeting threatening bloodshed and demanding that the constitution be changed so that all Cabinet Ministers were ethnic Fijians. He was subsequently charged with unlawful assembly and inciting racial antagonism under Fiji's colonial-era Public Order Ordinance, convicted, and jailed for six months. He then lost his seat in the September 1977 Fijian general election.

Butadroka later became one of the leaders of the Taukei Movement in 1987, whose agitation formed the backdrop to the 1987 Fijian coups d'état that deposed the elected government and severed Fiji's ties to the British Monarchy that year. He was appointed to Sitiveni Rabuka's interim Cabinet following the 1987 coup a

Fiji  is a bit like Churchill’s Russia, a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”.

Here is a beautiful country full of a talented population, sophisticated infrastructure and abundant natural resources which is sadly prone to debilitating self-inflected wounds that hobble its present and dent its future.

One coup is bad enough for any country, but three (or four) in short succession is sheer madness. Yet, despite the mayhem, there has never been a serious reflection on why things have turned out the way they have, why “the centre cannot hold”, to quote Chinua Achebe again. Its leaders kept sweeping the dust under the carpet, but the dust never goes away. Or, to change the metaphor, they keep trying to turn the hands of the clock back, but that does not do the clock any good.

The ghosts of past misdeeds have never been exorcised. They will continue to haunt the country: that is the lesson of history. There will always be a misguided colonel or a commodore lurking in the shadows dreaming of grandeur and glory, and fancying his chances. It has happened before. Fiji’s problems lie in the failure of its leaders to confront the conundrum of its history.

Instead, they have always averted their eyes and kept on pouting pious platitudes about being a “beacon of hope to the world” as Pope John Paul II intoned on a fleeting visit to Fiji in November 1986. Alas, prophesy was not his forte.

Colonial heritage 

Fiji’s problems start with the policies Fiji’s founding governor Sir Arthur Gordon promulgated soon after the cession of the islands to the United Kingdom on October 10, 1874. Three contending, not say contradictory, understandings formed the foundations of Fiji’s political culture.

The indigenous Fijians, now iTaukei, were by policy shielded from mainstream society and confined to their subsistence lifestyle under the leadership of their traditional elders with powers codified at law.

n time they came to believe, or rather

Political party of Fiji

The Fijian Nationalist Party (FNP) was a nationalist political party in Fiji.

History

The party was established on 19 January 1974 by MP Sakeasi Butadroka after he had been expelled from the Alliance Party. Using its slogan 'Fiji for the Fijian', it called for the abolition of the common roll and two-thirds of seats in parliament to be reserved for Fijians.

Its support peaked in the March 1977 general elections, when it received 5.3% of the vote. Although it won only one seat in the 52-member House of Representatives, most of its votes came at the expense of the Alliance, allowing the Indo-Fijian-dominated National Federation Party to become the largest party in the House and precipitating a constitutional crisis. Early elections were held in September 1977, in which the party lost its only seat and saw its vote share halved.

After failing to win a seat in elections in 1982 and 1987, in 1992 the party was renamed the Fijian Nationalist United Front Party won three seats in the elections that year. However, it lost all three seats in the 1994 elections.

In the late 1990s, the FNUFP merged with the Vanua Tako Lavo Party, which shared its strong opposition to the 1997 constitution. The merged party, known as the Nationalist Vanua Tako Lavo Party, was implicated by Maciu Navakasuasua, who was convicted of offences related to the Fiji coup of 2000, in the planning of the coup which deposed the elected government of Prime MinisterMahendra Chaudhry.

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