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.
Pasifika Talanoa by a traveled ITaukei Fijian 