Pasifika Talanoa by a traveled ITaukei Fijian

A place to share my thoughts and reflections

Tumblr ↗

  • The Weight of Witness: A Narrative on the UN Gaza Report

    The documents arrived with the quiet authority of devastation. Three senior international jurists, chaired by a former Indian judge, had spent months compiling testimony that would challenge the conscience of the world. Their conclusion lands like a hammer on the glass house of international law: the Israeli military deliberately targeted children in Gaza—an act amounting to genocide—and in the West Bank, war crimes.

    The Children’s Calculus

    There is a particular horror in the mathematics of this report. The commission documented the deliberate shooting of children by soldiers, the systematic destruction of hospitals and maternity centers, the indiscriminate use of explosive munitions in densely populated areas. Seventeen medical workers who served in Gaza told investigators they observed a pattern: children arriving with single gunshot wounds, “suggesting that the shot was carefully aimed rather than incidental or the result of indiscriminate fire.”

    Consider the case of the 15-year-old boy in Khan Younis, holding a white flag—the universal symbol of surrender and civilian status. He was shot by a sniper from 200 meters away, a distance that demands precision. His brother came to rescue him and was also shot. Their mother rushed to save both children and was shot as well. All from .338-caliber rounds, all from relatively close range, all while displaying the emblem that should have guaranteed their protection under international law.

    Or consider Jad Jadallah, a 14-year-old boy shot outside his home in the Jordan Valley. For 45 minutes, he bled to death while Israeli soldiers stood by, refusing medical aid, firing warning shots at his mother when she tried to reach him. They placed a stone next to his body, apparently to frame him as armed. The IDF later claimed they provided “initial medical treatment,” but the commission’s evidence tells a different story.

    The Architecture of Denial

    The Israeli Foreign Ministry’s response follows a familiar pattern: dismiss the report as “propaganda,” a “libelous sham,” a document lacking “credible verification.” The ministry invoked “modern blood libels”—a term that carries the weight of centuries of antisemitic persecution—to deflect attention from the commission’s meticulous documentation.

    This is not the first time Israel will vehemently disagree with an internationally staffed and issued report. The pattern is predictable: challenge the mandate, question the motives, dismiss the methodology. But the days of gaslighting are behind us. The commission interviewed victims, families, health care workers, and lawyers. They reviewed medical records. They documented specific incidents with specific dates and specific wounds. The evidence is not abstract; it is written in the bodies of children.

    The Framework of Intent

    What transforms these acts from war crimes to genocide is the pattern. The commission found that the destruction of hospitals, schools, and maternity centers—the very infrastructure of Palestinian future—reflects a strategy to destroy the future of Palestinians. When Israeli forces continued targeting children even after a ceasefire was reached in October, the commission saw confirmation of genocidal intent.

    This is the critical legal distinction: not every atrocity constitutes genocide. Genocide requires specific intent—a deliberate, systematic effort to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. The commission argues that Israel’s actions, particularly those affecting children, demonstrate such intent. By systematically eliminating the young, Israel is attempting to destroy the Palestinian future itself.

    The term “genocide” carries enormous weight, and it is not deployed lightly by international jurists. But a growing number of genocide experts—including Israeli scholars and human rights organizations—have echoed this finding. The Israeli government’s strenuous denials notwithstanding, the legal consensus is shifting.

    The Culture of Impunity

    Christopher Sidoti, the former Australian human rights commissioner and member of the UN commission, posed questions that cut to the heart of this tragedy:

    “What kind of people are your soldiers, who would allow a 14-year-old child to bleed to death over a 45-minute period? What kind of people are your military leaders that would inculcate a culture that soldiers feel free to do this? What kind of people are your leaders when they give orders, they give statements, that encourage this kind of conduct?”

    The questions are devastating because they point not to isolated incidents but to a systematic culture. When soldiers can shoot a child holding a white flag from 200 meters away, when they can run a tank over a wounded 16-year-old, when they can watch a boy bleed to death for 45 minutes—these are not the actions of rogue individuals. They are the manifestations of institutionalized impunity.

    The commission’s most radical conclusion is this: “Anyone who has served in the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza since October 2023 must be considered a suspect for the commission of war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide.”

    This is not rhetorical excess. It is a legal judgment based on evidence—and it demands a response beyond diplomatic condemnation.

    The World That Watches

    For years, the international community has expressed “deep concern” and issued “strong condemnations.” The commission argues—and the weight of evidence supports—that such responses are no longer sufficient. The phrase “We must move beyond” is not a suggestion; it is an indictment of the world that has watched these events unfold.

    Israel and its allies will argue that this report is biased, that it ignores Hamas’s atrocities, that it fails to acknowledge the complexity of urban warfare. The Israeli Foreign Ministry claims the report “actively conceals clear evidence of terrorist atrocities” and overlooks crimes committed against Israeli children.

    These arguments have force—no conflict can be reduced to a single narrative of victimhood. But they do not erase the evidence documented by the commission. The deaths of Israeli children do not justify the deliberate targeting of Palestinian children. The atrocities of Hamas do not transform Israeli war crimes into legitimate acts of self-defense.

    The Unfinished Reckoning

    We are at a moment of historical reckoning. The UN commission has done its work; it has documented, it has analyzed, it has concluded. Now international institutions must act. The commission has called on international bodies to hold Israeli officials accountable.

    But accountability cannot stop at government officials. Sidoti’s pointed questions extend to all of us who have watched, who have expressed concern, who have issued condemnations, who have moved on to the next headline. What kind of people are we, who allow such acts to continue?

    The answer to that question will be written not in reports but in actions. The commission has done its part. The rest is up to the world.

  • Fatal Vital Signs: Why Fiji’s Sugar Industry Must Be Allowed to Die

    By the numbers, our sugar industry is no longer a struggling patient—it is a corpse kept warm by political ventilators. Under the previous regime, the Fiji Sugar Corporation bled $543 million in losses. Since the Coalition took over in 2022, it has haemorrhaged a further $106 million—achieved despite a $200 million government debt write-off. Production languishes at 1.33 million tonnes, far below the 1.5 million tonnes required to justify the current $85-per-tonne subsidy.

    When an industry loses a billion dollars across two decades, requires constant taxpayer top-ups, and fails to achieve economies of scale, it is not a commercial enterprise—it is a charity case. Yet we persist, primarily because of politics.

    The ICU Delusion

    Sugarcane farming has devolved into a “mom-and-pop” hobby. The children of farmers have fled to tourism hubs and supermarket packing sheds; they refuse to endure backbreaking labour for cents on the dollar. Traditional knowledge was deliberately not passed on, because parents wanted their children to escape the drudgery. We now face an aging farmer base with no succession plan.

    Meanwhile, the land lies fallow. One encounter with a tenant selling leased TLTB land for $100,000 an acre—land choked with para grass, no road access, no power—exposes the speculative fantasy propping up this industry. It is not farming; it is waiting for a payout.

    Politics Over Economics

    The National Farmers Union has dug in, demanding the government negotiate directly with them and threatening to boycott the 2026 harvest unless a $60-per-tonne delivery price is met. This is political hostage-taking, not economic negotiation. The union refuses to acknowledge global realities where Brazil, Australia, and India have mechanized and driven prices into the dirt. Instead, they demand ever-higher subsidies while resisting structural reform.

    Proposals to legislate maximum production and nationalize idle farms are equally misguided. We cannot cure an industry by forcing farmers into it with legal coercion. If you have to threaten farmers with nationalization to make them farm, the industry is already comatose.

    The Unforgivable Sin

    The most damning aspect is the opportunity cost. Why is the Fijian taxpayer pouring hundreds of millions into an unviable crop, while iTaukei non-sugar farmers receive virtually nothing?

    Consider the structural inequity:

    · The State subsidizes cane growers (predominantly Indo-Fijian lessees) to the tune of $85 to $106 per tonne, guaranteeing an income regardless of global market prices.

    · Meanwhile, iTaukei landowners receive paltry, below-market rent via the TLTB—paid late, undervaluing their ancestral inheritance.

    · iTaukei farmers who wish to diversify into ginger, turmeric, kava, or vegetables receive a fraction of government attention and none of the guaranteed subsidies sugar farmers enjoy.

    This is not just economic failure; it is a profound governance failure and a breach of fiduciary duty to the traditional custodians of the land. We are using public funds to trap one community in generational debt while another sees its land utilized for pennies on the dollar. The $105 million annual loss is effectively a transfer of wealth from the general taxpayer to a politically influential, shrinking minority of sugarcane growers. Landowners are left with degraded soil and cheap rent, while the Minister smiles and tells farmers in Labasa to “diversify”—without providing the capital that sugar subsidies so wastefully absorb.

    The Do-Not-Resuscitate Order

    It is time to issue a DNR order for the sugar industry. We must stop confusing nostalgia with national interest. The government should initiate a managed wind-down:

    1. Cease the Subsidies: Announce a three-year sunset period. No more taxpayer top-ups. Let the global market price dictate the farm-gate price. If it is unviable, it dies.

    2. Compensate Transition: Use the money saved from annual $100M+ losses to fund a massive vocational training programme for all farmers—sugarcane growers, iTaukei landowners, and non-sugar farmers alike. Teach them commercial alternatives, aquaculture, or agro-tourism.

    3. Empower the Landowners: Rewrite the TLTB framework to give landowners autonomy to form agricultural corporations, develop commercial plazas, and lease to productive ventures—not just sugar monoculture.

    For 56 years, politicians have deceived farmers to secure their votes, promising salvation while presiding over decline. The NFU and the Labour Party cannot be allowed to hold the nation hostage over a crop that no longer pays its way.

    Fiji does not need to produce raw sugar for the world. Fiji needs to produce prosperity for all its citizens. That starts by pulling the plug on a dying industry and directing resources toward the living, breathing farmers—iTaukei and otherwise—who are ready to grow something more valuable than a colonial relic. The time for bold, uncomfortable decisions has arrived. The sugar industry is on ICU, and for the sake of our rural economy, we must let it go.

  • A Decade After Brexit: Reflections from a French Farmhouse

    Nine years ago, in the heart of French wine country, a group of friends gathered for what was supposed to be a week of simple pleasures. 

    The rural district of Les Marronniers is the kind of place where time moves differently. Vineyards stretch toward the horizon, stone farmhouses hold centuries of stories, and the air carries the scent of earth and aging oak. It was there, in our friend Helena Eversole’s typically French farmhouse, that far-flung friends reunited for a week of wine, dining, and reminiscence.

    But as dusk settled each evening and bottles of local Bordeaux were uncorked, our conversations drifted from shared memories to the question of Brexit.

    The Leave campaign had promised something seductive: “Take back control.” For millions, that slogan spoke to unease about where the globalized world was headed—tighter borders, reclaimed sovereignty. For others, Brexit meant a transformed Britain: a “Singapore-on-Thames,” a deregulated, low-tax competitor ready to strike trade deals with the wider world.

    Around Helena’s table, lively discussions went late into the night. One saw liberation. Others warned of isolation and economic self-harm. “We’ll be free,” one friend insisted. “Free to make ourselves poorer?” another countered. Neither could predict just how right—and how wrong—they would both turn out to be.

    A decade on, the data tells a sobering story. Published economic research estimate that Brexit reduced Britain’s GDP by upto 8% by 2025 and a 15% drop in trade. As The Economist argued, “Brexit lingers like a toxin in the economy’s bloodstream”

    The promised Singapore never materialized. Britain under Thatcher had prospered by shaping free trade rules. But now, as the world fragments into competing blocs, Britain has “fallen through the cracks.” When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, another cost emerged: British defense firms have been largely shut out of the EU’s rearmament programme. Brexit’s cost was never just economic.

    Harder to measure is the cost of what Britain didn’t do—years consumed by revolving-door leadership and endless debate over how to leave. Meanwhile, public sentiment has soured. The share of Britons who say Brexit is worse than expected has nearly doubled.

    Yet Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, now leads national polls, eroding Labour and Conservative dominance. Brexit continues to define voting lines, with Reform appealing to older, less-educated voters driven by cultural anxiety.

    The lesson of the past decade is that there are no clean exits and no clean returns. Reversal is unrealistic. Some advocate a Swiss-style arrangement—a patchwork of treaties to align with the EU on trade, science, and security. Britain would become a rule-taker rather than a rule-maker. Imperfect, but perhaps necessary.

    I think back to Les Marronniers—the long dinners, the clinking glasses, the discussions stretching late into the night. None of us sensed that the world was shifting. Old certainties were crumbling. And Britain had chosen to walk away from its nearest neighbors.

    Helena’s farmhouse had stood for centuries. It had seen France and Britain fight, and it had seen them reconcile. As we sat there in 2017, we wondered what the future held.

    A decade on, the question remains. But the debate has shifted. It is no longer about whether Brexit was right or wrong. It is about what comes next—for Britain and for the millions who will live with the consequences for years to come.

    The vineyards endure. The wine still pours at Helena’s Les Marronniers farmhouse and the conversations continue.

  • The Solidarity Debt

    When the decapitation strikes came, the Western assumption was clinical: remove the head, and the body collapses. Instead, Iranians who had recently protested did not celebrate—they rallied. This was not an endorsement of the Supreme Leader; it was an assertion of civilizational sovereignty. From Alexander to the Mongols, from the British to the Americans, invaders have misread internal fractures as weakness, only to discover that Persian identity, Shia mourning culture, and a deep distrust of foreign domination form an alloy, no missile can shatter.

    The West views Iran through the regime; Iranians view it through the lens of Iran. Survival, however, is not legitimacy. The people set aside grievances over justice, freedom, and economic despair to face a common enemy. That sacrifice was a down payment on a promise: We stood by you; now stand by us.

    The $300 billion the West dangles is beside the point. Iran’s true wealth is human—engineers, poets, women, diaspora—but trapped in a siege mentality that equates internal reform with capitulation. The regime’s paradox is cruel: to protect the nation from foreign domination, it has domesticated a form of internal domination that alienates the very citizens who just proved their loyalty.

    Consider Fiji. Tourism publicists have long known that our strength is not merely our coral reefs, but the living culture, warmth, and dignity of the iTaukei. Travelers return speaking not of beaches alone, but of the warmth of our smiles, lovo feasts, and genuine hospitality no resort can manufacture. Yet internal empowerment has historically lagged external recognition. The nation must learn what our promoters already know: strength lies in elevating its indigenous population, not sidelining them as a backdrop.

    The same applies to Iran. Its true potential is not missiles, nuclear thresholds, or regional proxies. It is the engineers who kept the internet running during cyberattacks, the women who organized neighbourhood defense networks, the ethnic minorities who defended borders they are often told do not belong to them. They are not subjects to be policed; they are the nation’s enduring asset. Outsiders—whether Western strategists or Chinese investors—already see their value. The regime’s task is to see it first.

    If Iran honours its civilization, it must recognize that its greatest threat today is not the US or Israel, but the gap between external resilience and internal stagnation. Post-war solidarity is fleeting. If not seized to address economic decay, social restrictions, and political exclusion, it will curdle into bitterness more potent than pre-war protests.

    Realizing Iran’s potential requires three shifts, all flowing from valuing its people:

    First, economic renewal—unleash the private sector, tech startups, and diaspora returnees as partners, not potential dissidents. Iran cannot rebuild on oil rents alone.

    Second, civic integration—the Kurds, Baloch, and Azeris are pillars, not minorities to be managed. True peace requires constitutional recognition of this mosaic, just as Fiji’s path to stability is through acknowledgement and entrenchment, not erasure, of its indigenous people.

    Third, a new social contract for women—they defended the nation while demanding their place. The regime cannot ask them to die for the flag and then deny them the right to live freely under it. Like Fijian women, they are the architects of the next generation.

    History will not judge Iran by whether it survived a foreign onslaught—empires have survived before. It will judge whether Iran used that survival to become a nation that does not need to suppress its own people to repel its enemies. The West’s colonial mindset assumes reform comes from outside; true reform must come from within, born of the same defiant spirit that just repelled aggression. Iranians are the nation. The regime must prove it belongs to them, not above them.

    Just as Fiji’s publicists grasped that our islands’ magic lies in our indigenous people, Iran’s rulers must grasp that its true strength lies in its own citizen who chose solidarity over fragmentation. The window is narrow. If the regime mistakes wartime loyalty for permanent acquiescence, it repeats the fatal error of every empire that misread its own subjects. But if it seizes this moment—making peace with its own people, recognizing them as its greatest asset—Iran will not just survive. It will thrive as a sovereign civilization, finally at peace with itself.

    That is the peace that matters. That is the favour that must be returned.

  • The Iran-Türkiye Condominium: West Asia’s New Geographical Order

    The Fall of the Old Guard

    The post–World War II order is dead. Nowhere is that truth more stark than in West Asia, where Iran—by geographic presence and civilizational endurance—has survived the US-Israeli war and now firmly controls the Hormuz Strait.

    A decade ago, Western strategists could sketch the region’s power map with confidence. Egypt commanded Arab political weight. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE anchored Gulf economic might under an American umbrella. Iraq and Syria contained Iranian influence. Today, that map is torn up. The center of gravity sits in Ankara and Tehran, while the Gulf monarchies have been exposed as brittle dependents—caught in a conflict they neither chose nor can control.

    The events of the past three weeks have only confirmed this reality. The US-Iran framework agreement, signed on 18 June, represented not merely a ceasefire but a formal acknowledgment that American primacy in West Asia has been superseded. But we must be precise about who has superseded it—and who has not.

    The War That Backfired

    The US-Israeli war against Iran, tacitly supported by the GCC in late February, was meant to cripple Tehran. Instead, it accelerated the emergence of Iran and Türkiye as West Asia’s indispensable powers. A war for American deterrence achieved the opposite.

    Before February 2026, the Gulf states had leveraged hydrocarbon wealth into a model of economic integration—technology, logistics, finance—that kept Washington invested in their security. But that model rested on a fragile assumption: that US protection would remain reliable and the Gulf could insulate itself from regional storms. The war shattered both. As Tehran retaliated against US bases across the region, Gulf states found themselves in a security trap—unable to join the war offensively, yet unable to prevent their territory from becoming a battlefield. Their strategic restraint signaled that the US guarantee is conditional at best.

    Analysts warned that if Iran survived with even limited control of the Strait, it would amount to a strategic defeat for the US, Israel, and the Gulf. After months of war, the regime stands. Tehran can punish Gulf economies at will—targeting energy facilities, disrupting the Strait, launching drone campaigns—while Washington had no political endgame.

    The Only Axis That Matters: Iran and Türkiye

    Much has been made of Israeli alarm over a “Türkiye-Qatar-Pakistan axis.” But this framing confuses tactical mediation with strategic weight. The axis that truly matters is not Türkiye-Qatar-Pakistan—a coalition of a rising power, a US-protected gas emirate, and a subcontinent-focused state. It is the geographically ordained bipolarity of Iran and Türkiye.

    These two powers possess what no other regional actor can match: military depth, demographic weight, geographic centrality, and genuine strategic autonomy from Washington. Between them, they command West Asia’s northern and eastern arcs. They are the only indigenous great powers in the region.

    Iran: Survival as Victory

    Iran now firmly controls the Hormuz Strait, through which a fifth of global oil passes. It has shown it can impose direct costs on the Gulf. Militarily weakened by the US-Israeli offensive but diplomatically rehabilitated by the agreement, Iran emerges in a paradoxical position of strength. It has traded military confrontation for international legitimacy, secured the rehabilitation of its economy, and retained its regional network intact—from Baghdad to Beirut, from Damascus to Sanaa. The agreement has not dismantled Iranian power projection. It has brought Iran back into the international system while leaving its strategic depth untouched.

    The GCC’s restraint throughout the war now reads for what it was: a signal that they view Tehran as an unavoidable permanent stakeholder, not just an adversary to be contained. That is a profound shift.

    Türkiye: The Northern Pole

    Türkiye’s rise has been quieter but equally significant. Ankara welcomed the ceasefire, warning that instability in Iran would sharpen anxieties over Kurdish militancy, refugees, and border security. By positioning itself as a stabilizing power and diplomatic interlocutor, Türkiye has enhanced its standing while avoiding direct costs. Its strategic autonomy—moving between NATO, Russia, and regional actors—has become a valuable asset.

    Erdoğan has made Türkiye’s position unambiguous. He declared that Israeli aggression in Lebanon and Syria had reached a point where it threatened Turkey directly, and called Israel the single biggest obstacle to regional peace. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, speaking alongside Russia’s Sergey Lavrov in Moscow, welcomed the US-Iran agreement but crucially called for it to evolve into “a structural and lasting security architecture rather than a temporary period of calm.”

    That phrase captures Ankara’s ambition. Türkiye is not interested in episodic crisis management. It is seeking to institutionalize a new regional order in which it is a permanent rule-setter—the Ottoman inheritance reframed for the twenty-first century. Crucially, Türkiye has drawn a red line over Lebanese and Syrian territory, declaring that Israeli operations there now threaten Turkish security directly. Under the old American-anchored order, no such red line existed.

    Managed Bipolarity

    This is not a partnership in perfect harmony. Türkiye and Iran are rival civilizational powers with a long history of strategic friction. The more precise framework is managed bipolarity—two hegemons who converge sufficiently on the containment of Israeli expansionism to cooperate diplomatically, while competing for influence across the Arab world’s contested spaces. But on the foundational question of this historical moment—that the old externally-imposed order must be replaced by one reflecting the region’s own balance of forces—they are aligned. That alignment is sufficient to constitute a genuinely new architecture.

    The Coming Reckoning for the GCC

    The states that bet on the old order—Bahrain, UAE, and to a lesser extent Saudi Arabia and Qatar—now face a reckoning. They signed the Abraham Accords and backed the US-Israeli war premised on American durability. Every premise has been shaken.

    Bahrain and the UAE are now exposed on multiple flanks: caught between an American patron recalibrating its commitments, an Israeli partner increasingly isolated from the new regional consensus, and an emerging bipolar order constructed without their input. Their most likely path is quiet hedging—softening public identification with Israeli positions, deepening economic ties with Türkiye, expanding back-channel contacts with Tehran. But the window for comfortable hedging is narrowing. The longer they remain identified with a receding order, the less leverage they will carry when they eventually seek terms with the one that is rising.

    Lebanon: The Proving Ground of Bipolarity

    Lebanon is the theatre where the Iran-Türkiye bipolarity is being tested in real time. Israel’s continued strikes on south Lebanon, even after the agreement, reveal the central tension of this transitional moment. Netanyahu, sidelined from the deal, is using Lebanon as the one theatre where he can still project agency. In doing so however, he is accelerating the dynamic that isolates Israel further.

    Erdoğan’s red line over Lebanon and Syria—declaring that Israeli attacks threaten Turkey directly—is an unprecedented assertion of Turkish strategic depth into the Levant. Iran, meanwhile, retains Hezbollah as its Lebanese strategic depth. The two hegemons do not coordinate perfectly, but they converge on a shared outcome: the stabilization of Lebanon as a buffer state within the new order, not as a perpetual battlefield for Israeli operations.

    For Israel, this is the core dilemma: military operations in Lebanon that once carried manageable costs now risk triggering a broader regional response that the new Iran-Türkiye bipolarity makes structurally coherent for the first time.

    No Plan, No Order—But Geography Has Reasserted Itself

    By launching an ill-defined campaign against Iran without a credible endgame, Washington accelerated the very realignments it feared: the rise of Iran and Türkiye and the exposure of Gulf dependence on an unreliable protector.

    The new global architecture will not be designed in Washington. It will be contested in the Hormuz Strait, on the Türkiye-Iranian frontier, and in boardrooms where Gulf investors decide whether to bet on the dollar or the renminbi. Geography has reasserted itself.

    The only indigenous geographical powers with the strategic autonomy, military depth, and demographic weight to shape West Asia’s future are Iran and Türkiye. Their bipolarity—rivalrous but convergent on the rejection of external domination—is the defining structural fact of the region.

    The question is not whether the old order is gone. It is whether anyone has a plan for what replaces it. The answer, increasingly clear, is that no external power does. The region is building its own order—around its own geographical poles.

  • Beyond the Chokehold: A Call for Solar Sovereignty

    My wife and I had been discussing solar power. Retirement brings a certain slo-mo consideration to everything—there was always a reason to wait for tomorrow, next month, or after the next trip. Then the world intervened, and that slow deliberation was jolted into fast-forward.

    First came the Iran-US war. Then the Hormuz Strait effectively closed. The strategy was to strangle Iran’s economy—and it succeeded. But it also strangled the global economy, including ours here in the Pasifika. For small island nations utterly dependent on shipped fuel, the pain arrived as fast as the breaking news. Higher prices at the pump. Canceled cargo shipments. EFL, Fiji Airways, and our inter-island ferries burning cash they do not have.

    Earlier today, Foreign Minister Sakiasi Ditoka offered a glimmer of hope: global fuel prices have dipped to around US90–$100 range. But here is the cruel arithmetic of island dependency—he cautioned that Fijians will wait. There is a “lag time” between international purchases and local supply. While the world pays $83, we continue to bleed at the old rates until the delayed shipments catch up. We are always the last to feel relief and the first to feel the squeeze.

    To his credit, Minister Ditoka has been tireless. He travelled to Singapore—the origin of our supply chain—to secure assurances that Fiji’s shipments would not again be pushed to the back of the queue. He travelled to Australia, securing $30 million in budget support and discussing strategic fuel reserves in Geelong with Viva Energy. Talks are even underway with Korea, Malaysia, and the United States. These are the frantic, expensive shuttles of a nation trying to secure a lifeline it does not control.

    Yet reading between the lines, the truth is unavoidable. Singapore confirmed it cannot control global prices. Australia admitted its own reserve situation is challenging. And even if we build regional storage or bulk-buy with neighbours, we are still playing a high-stakes game of geopolitical whack-a-mole. A tanker in Geelong or a promise from Kuala Lumpur does not insulate us from the next Hormuz crisis. It merely buys us time until the next rerouted shipment.

    This brings me to Vani Catanasiga’s recent warning: our vulnerability to global fuel shocks is not merely an economic headache—it is a social justice emergency. Every lag day at the pump hits the families in our villages and settlements hardest. When the Minister asks the public to be “understanding,” I empathise with his diplomatic burden. But empathy does not cool a fridge or fill a bus tank.

    That is why, two weeks ago, my wife and I made our start at home. Panels on the roof. Batteries on the wall. A meter that now spins backward. The upfront cost was not lite, but we saw it as an investment in sovereignty. Because the sun has no lag time. It does not require a flight to Singapore for assurances. It does not fluctuate with West Asian ceasefires, and it never gets pushed to the back of a queue.

    Minister Ditoka’s shuttle diplomacy is admirable, and those $30 million in Australian funds are welcome. But imagine if even a fraction of that regional maneuvering—the flights, the memoranda, the storage talks—were redirected into subsidising rooftop solar for every vulnerable household. Imagine if our “strategic reserve” were not barrels in Geelong, but batteries distributed across our islands.

    Our ancestors crossed these vast oceans by reading stars and currents. They understood self-reliance intrinsically. Today, our version of that is far simpler: sunlight falls on our shores every single day, free of geopolitics. The Government will continue its necessary, but ultimately reactive, work to secure the tankers. That is their job.

    But for us—the families, the retirees, the households who feel every lag day at the pump—the only lasting security is the one we generate ourselves. The war will end. The strait will reopen. The price will drop to $80, then climb again. The tankers will come, or they will not.

    The sun, however, never cancels its cargo. For us in the Pasifika, sovereignty is not found in a diplomatic note from Singapore or a reserve in Geelong. It is harvested from the sky above—one panel, one home, one island at a time.

  • The Temple Within: Reclaiming Pasifika Faith Through Inculturation

    “This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own mind, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.”

    There is a truth in these words that our ancestors understood before the ships arrived. They did not search for it. They lived within it. Their mind, their heart, their Vanua, their Qoliqoli—that was the temple. And kindness was not a doctrine; it was how they fished, how they planted, how they mourned together, and how they forgave.

    And then came the missionaries—hand-in-glove with colonialism.

    Western missionaries did not simply offer a new faith; they declared our old one vakatevoro—devil worship. They painted our ancestors as lost, our chants as evil, our connection to land and sea as primitive superstition. They rewrote the very skin of divinity: Jesus, born in Bethlehem under a Middle Eastern sun, was rendered white. White was pure. White was saved. We were told that our blackness was a stain, only their God could wash away.

    Generations internalized this. We burned our carvings. Our Tabua even. We learned to kneel and recite and look outward—to Jerusalem, Rome, to Canterbury, to Salt Lake City—for a holiness we had always carried in our own breath. The temple within was boarded up. The search became external, desperate, and colonial: to be good meant to be like them.

    But here is what we are finally remembering: our traditional spirituality was never devil worship. It was environmental wisdom in sacred form. Our protocols for when to fish and when to rest the qoliqoli were not superstition; they were sustainable marine resource management. Our cycles for planting and harvesting aligned with lunar patterns and soil regeneration. Our reverence for Vanua—land, people, and spirit as one—is now being rediscovered by climate scientists as “community-based adaptation.” We were not primitive. We were prescient.

    The great tragedy is that we spent centuries searching for the wrong reasons—to earn a white God’s favor, to escape the label of heathen, to fill a void that colonialism carved into our identity. But the void was artificial. The temple was never destroyed; only ignored.

    The Wisdom Already Within

    Recently, a niece shared with me her reading of Richard Schwartz’s ‘No Bad Parts’, a book about Internal Family Systems therapy. She wrote:

    “The book talks about how people carry different parts of themselves—some wounded, some protective, some carrying burdens from past experiences—and how healing comes through understanding, connection, and compassion rather than judgment. As I read, I was struck by how much it aligns with many of the things you write about… It reminded me that long before these ideas appeared in books and research papers, our ancestors understood the importance of belonging, relationships, storytelling, identity, and caring for one another. Traditional knowledge and practices weren’t just customs—they were ways of keeping people connected, grounded, and accountable to the community.”

    Her words struck me deeply. Here is modern psychology—peer-reviewed, evidence-based, respected—arriving at the same conclusions our ancestors lived for millennia. The idea that healing comes through understanding and compassion, not judgment. The recognition that we carry many parts within us—some wounded, some protective—and that integration, not exorcism, is the path to wholeness.

    Our ancestors knew this. They understood that a person who had broken a tabu, was not irredeemably evil but needed restoration through ceremony, community, and veilomani. They understood that healing required belonging, that identity was not individual but communal, and that stories carried the medicine of memory.

    This is what I mean when I say the temple is within. Not that we are perfect, but that the seeds of healing, wisdom, and connection are already planted in us—in our traditions, our relationships, our Vanua. We don’t need to import a foreign framework to become whole. We need to unearth what was always ours.

    As my niece put it, “Some of what modern psychology is discovering today is simply catching up with truths that many cultures have carried for generations.”

    The Gift of Inculturation

    This brings us to a concept that offers a way forward: inculturation. Archbishop Peter Loy Chong, in his recent homily honouring the late Ratu Manoa Rasigatale—a son of Rewa, of Fiji, master storyteller and cultural theologian—spoke of this with profound clarity. Inculturation is the process by which faith adapts its teachings, practices, and rituals to fit a specific culture. Instead of forcing one culture’s traditions onto another, it expresses core beliefs using the local population’s language, values, and customs—without changing fundamental truth.

    Rooted deeply in the Christian concept of the Incarnation—the idea that God became fully human in a specific time and place—inculturation teaches that the Gospel must similarly “take flesh” in every culture it reaches. It is a two-way street: the message transforms the culture by challenging harmful practices, while the culture gives the message a fresh, unique way of being understood.

    Ratu Manoa embodied this. He gathered forgotten memories like the dulali (nose flute) and the bacaniqele (earthworm)—symbols our ancestors used in worship and daily life—and made them alive again for today. He designed ceremonial garments and stained glass that depicted Fijian symbols, not European saints. He showed us that the Gospel does not destroy culture; it enters into our culture, purifies some of it, and allows God to speak through it.

    When he welcomed visitors with a kamunaga, he wasn’t just offering a whale’s tooth. He was communicating something that words cannot: honor, humility, and sacred relationship. As the Archbishop said, “Symbols communicate things that touch the mind, the heart, and the imagination that words cannot communicate.”

    Ratu Manoa was more than a storyteller. He was a theologian—helping us see God and experience God through the richness of iTaukei culture. In his own way, he was doing what the Gospel has always done: translating the eternal into the local. He was practicing inculturation before it had a name.

    Reclaiming the Inner Temple

    Some say this is unbiblical. They quote Jeremiah 17:9—”The heart is deceitful above all things”—and argue that looking inward is a path to self-deception, not salvation. They insist that humanity is separated from God through sin and that salvation comes only through faith in Jesus Christ.

    I do not deny these truths. But I reject the colonial framework that says our pre-Christian selves were irredeemably lost and that our ancestors were spiritually empty.

    Consider this: Darwin proposed an origin of life that challenged literal Genesis. Some called it heresy, yet mainstream science accepts it—not as anti-God, but as revealing God’s creative process. Similarly, missionaries called our ancestral wisdom “devil worship,” yet it held ecological and communal truths—God’s fingerprints on our Vanua. If science can broaden our understanding of God beyond a single interpretation, why can’t our culture?

    The Bible itself is full of people who met God in mountains, trees, wells, and ordinary homes—not just in foreign-built institutions. God’s fingerprints are on creation (Romans 1:20). And creation includes the Vanua, the Qoliqoli, and the wisdom of our ancestors.

    The claim is not that humanity contains a hidden divinity waiting to be awakened. The claim is that the Imago Dei—the image of God—was never erased, only buried. Colonialism tried to bury it under foreign rituals, foreign hymns, and foreign garments. Inculturation digs it back up. It says: You do not need to become European to become Christian. You can be ITaukei. You can be Pasifika. And you can follow Christ—not because you abandoned your ancestors, but because the God who made them also made you.

    And as my niece observed, modern psychology is now affirming what our ancestors always knew: healing comes through understanding and compassion, not judgment. The parts of us that are wounded, protective, or burdened are not evil to be cast out. They are parts to be understood, integrated, and brought into the wholeness of community.

    A New Way Forward

    Archbishop Loy Chong has spoken of the veiwekani—the sacred interconnection between faith (Lotu), land (Vanua), and governance (Matanitu). He has called for fusing religion with iTaukei faith and spirituality: Sema na lotu kei na ka vakavanua.

    This is a fresh approach—one that recognizes the Vanua and vakavanua as essential to faith. It is a vision that is sadly missing in Western liberal democracies, where religion has become privatized and culture has become secularized. But in the Pasifika, we have an opportunity to do something different. We can hold both: the Gospel and our culture. Not in tension, but in harmony.

    This is not syncretism. It is not mixing Christianity with paganism. It is recognizing that the Gospel was never meant to be a foreign transplant. It was always meant to take root in every soil, speak in every tongue, and sing in every rhythm.

    The philosophy is kindness. Not as a works-based salvation, but as the fruit of a faith that is truly incarnated. When we care for the reef, we are caring for creation. When we share the harvest, we are living veilomani. When we honor our ancestors, we are honoring the generations that prepared the way for us.

    Modern psychology tells us that belonging, relationships, storytelling, identity, and caring for one another are essential to human flourishing. Our ancestors knew this. The Gospel affirms this. And inculturation allows us to live this truth in our own way, with our own symbols, in our own language.

    Restoring the Library

    Ratu Manoa’s passing is like the burning of a library. His stories, his symbols, his wisdom—they are irreplaceable. But his legacy endures. His videos remain. His teachings remain. The symbols—the dulali, the bacaniqele, the kamunaga—remain.

    And now it is our turn to carry them forward. Not as relics of a pagan past, but as living expressions of a faith that is rooted in our identity. We must preserve his stories, share his videos, and continue the work of inculturation. We must ensure that future generations know who they are as ITaukei, as Pasifika, and as Christians—not in spite of their culture, but because of it.

    Let us stop searching for the wrong reasons—to impress, to secure, to escape, to control. Let us instead sit quietly in the only temple that matters: the open, honest, beating heart of our own awareness. And from that stillness, let kindness simply flow. No temple required. No foreign philosophy needed. Just this. Just us. Just now.

    Because in my book, my religion is within me first and foremost. That doesn’t make it false—it makes it mine. And if the Gospel is truly for all nations, then it must be able to speak in the language of my ancestors, sing in the rhythm of my meke, and dwell in the Vanua that has held our people for centuries.

    The storyteller has gone from our side, but his stories remain. The voice that once told the stories of Fiji, now rests in the presence of the One who is the source of every story, every culture, every language, every people. May his legacy continue to speak long after his voice has fallen silent. May the winds be fair, the seas calm, and the light of the Almighty, guide us all safely home.

    And may we, his children, have the courage to look inward—not to find perfection, but to find the temple that was never destroyed, only waiting to be reopened.

  • The Portugal–DRC and Spain–Cape Verde Lesson: Why World Rugby Must Abandon Its Colonial Playbook for FIFA’s Global Vision

    The 2026 FIFA World Cup draw offered not one, but two moments that, for decades, would have been unthinkable. Portugal—European powerhouse, home to Cristiano Ronaldo’s legacy—sharing a group-stage conversation with the Democratic Republic of Congo. Spain—tiki-taka royalty, World Cup champions—drawn alongside Cape Verde, a tiny island nation that only a generation ago was a football afterthought. These are not ceremonial sacrificial lambs. These are competitive threats, legitimate narratives, and commercial goldmines. Neither the DRC nor Cape Verde qualified by accident. They qualified because FIFA, belatedly and imperfectly, understood that growing the pie benefits everyone—more viewers, more unpredictable storylines, more grassroots investment, and ultimately, more revenue for the entire ecosystem.

    Now, cast your eyes to the other side of the global sporting spectrum, and you will find World Rugby—a governing body still mesmerized by the sepia-toned ghosts of the British Empire. While FIFA has democratised the beautiful game, World Rugby has perfected the art of structural apartheid, masquerading as “tradition.” The recent elevation of Fiji and Japan to Tier 1 status is not a victory; it is a performative crumb thrown from a banquet table that Tonga and Samoa are not even allowed to approach. This is colonialism rebranded—not with flags and cannons, but with broadcasting rights, fixture calendars, and centralised voting blocs.

    Let us be brutally clear about the numbers. Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga produce more professional rugby talent per capita than any nation on earth. They are the lifeblood of the global game—the entertainers, the innovators, the teams that play with “reckless abandonment” because they have nothing to lose and everything to prove. Yet, while their players fill the starting XVs of Australia, New Zealand, and France, their national unions are left to beg for scraps. They are granted one-off tests against Tier 1 nations once a blue moon, usually at neutral venues that extract maximum revenue for the host union and minimum investment back into Pasifika grassroots. This is not neglect; it is exploitation. It is the extraction of human capital without the repatriation of financial capital—the very essence of neocolonial economic theory.

    World Rugby’s defense is always the same: “We need to protect the integrity of the Rugby Championship and the Six Nations.” Protect what, exactly? A closed shop of old money where the same six European nations and the same three southern hemisphere aristocrats rotate the same trophies, while the rest of the world is fed a diet of one-off friendlies that are forgotten by Monday? Contrast this with FIFA’s expanded World Cup. The tournament is richer, not poorer, for the inclusion of minnows. A Spain–Cape Verde clash is no longer a foregone conclusion; it is a stage for the world to discover new heroes like Cape Verde’s 40-year old Josimar Dias-Vozinha . The global fanbase has exploded because fans in Kinshasa, Praia, Tbilisi, and Doha now have a stake in the narrative. They buy jerseys, they watch broadcasts, they inspire children. Rugby, by contrast, is cannibalising its own future by confining its “product” to a nostalgic cartel.

    The hypocrisy is suffocating. World Rugby finally admits Fiji and Japan to the elite table, yet Samoa and Tonga—who have beaten Tier 1 nations in recent World Cups—remain in the “doldrums.” Why? Because they do not offer lucrative television markets. That is the new colonialism: economic viability over sporting merit. It is the loudspeaker of the Global North dictating terms to the Global South, not with gunboats, but with broadcast schedules and ranking algorithms that deliberately starve tier-two nations of the regular, high-intensity fixtures required to climb the ladder.

    If World Rugby had even a fraction of FIFA’s strategic foresight, they would mandate that every Tier 1 nation must play a minimum of three away Tests in the Pasifika or emerging African nations per four-year cycle, with all gate revenue shared 50-50. They would scrap the Nations Cup proposal designed to entrench the status quo, and instead adopt a genuine promotion-relegation system for the Six Nations and Rugby Championship. They would redirect the surplus from the World Cup—a tournament that survives on the passion of Pasifika and African fans—into high-performance academies in Nuku’alofa, Apia, and even Kenyan outposts, rather than into the bloated administrative coffers of London and Dublin.

    FIFA is far from perfect; corruption and politics have stained its history. But on the fundamental question of growth, FIFA has embraced the reality that the future of sport is multilateral. The Portugal–DRC and Spain–Cape Verde fixtures are harbingers of football’s vibrant, chaotic, and inclusive future. Rugby’s equivalent—a potential Samoa vs. England or Tonga vs. France clash in a pool stage—is treated by World Rugby as a risk to be managed, rather than an opportunity to be celebrated. Until World Rugby unshackles itself from this institutionalised prejudice, until it redistributes wealth and fixtures with the same vigour it protects its own, it will remain not a world sport, but a colonial relic—beautifully played, but morally bankrupt and commercially stagnant.

    The world has moved on. Rugby has not. And that silence from the Pasifika and the broader Global South is not acceptance; it is the sound of a game slowly suffocating its own soul.

  • The Temple Within: Why We Searched Everywhere but Home

    “This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own mind, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.”

    There is a truth in these words that our ancestors would have understood immediately. Before the ships arrived, before the hymns were translated, we did not search for the sacred. We lived within it. Our mind, our heart, our land, our sea—that was the temple. And kindness was not a doctrine; it was how we fished, how we planted, how we forgave, and how we mourned together.

    And then came the missionaries.

    For most Pasifika island states, religion arrived hand-in-glove with colonialism. Western missionaries did not simply offer a new faith; they declared our old one vakatevoro—devil worship. They painted our ancestors as lost, our chants as evil, our connection to Vanua and Qoliqoli as primitive superstition. They rewrote the very skin of divinity: Jesus, born in Bethlehem under the Middle Eastern sun, was rendered white. White was pure. White was saved. We were told that our blackness was a stain only their God could wash away.

    Generations internalized this. We burned our carvings. Our Tabua even. We learned to kneel and recite and look outward—to Jerusalem, Rome, to Canterbury, to Salt Lake City—for a holiness we had always carried in our own breath. The temple within was boarded up. The search became external, desperate, and colonial: to be good meant to be like them.

    But here is what we are finally remembering: our traditional spirituality was never devil worship. It was environmental wisdom in sacred form. Our protocols for when to fish and when to rest the qoliqoli were not superstition; they were sustainable marine resource management. Our cycles for planting and harvesting certain crops aligned with lunar patterns and soil regeneration. Our reverence for Vanua—land, people, and spirit as one—is now being rediscovered by climate scientists as “community-based adaptation.” We were not primitive. We were prescient.

    The great tragedy is that we spent centuries searching for the wrong reasons—to earn a white God’s favor, to escape the label of heathen, to fill a void that colonialism carved into our identity. But the void was artificial. The temple was never destroyed; only ignored.

    Now, across the Pasifika, we are returning home. Not to reject faith, but to reclaim the ground under our feet. We are learning again that kindness is not a sermon but an action: caring for the reef so our children can eat, sharing the harvest because veilomani is the law and, sitting in the quietness of our own hearts where no missionary ever had the keys.

    There is no need for foreign temples. Our mind, our heart, our Vanua, our Qoliqoli—that is enough. The philosophy was always kindness. We just had to stop searching everywhere else long enough to feel it beating inside us, where it had never left.

  • The Last Plane Out of Mogadishu: Remembering Ambassador James Victor Gbeho

    There are diplomats who command rooms with booming voices, and then there are those who command respect through quiet stillness. Ambassador James Victor Gbeho of Ghana belonged decisively to the latter camp—and he may have been the ultimate diplomat I ever knew.

    The Wikipedia summary—Ghanaian lawyer, President of the ECOWAS Commission, Permanent Representative to the UN—reads like a standard obituary of institutional achievement. But those sterile bullet points fail entirely to capture the man I watched navigate the impossible geometry of Somalia’s clan politics in 1994. Nor do they hint at the quiet dignity he carried from his earlier postings in Geneva, Vienna, New York, and Havana—a lifetime of listening before ever speaking.

    By the time Ambassador Gbeho arrived as UN Special Representative in July of that year, UNOSOM was already terminal. The mission had been gutted by the October 1993 firefight that killed 18 US servicemen, after which America’s patience evaporated and everyone else’s followed. Three Special Representatives had come and gone. Now Gbeho was handed a dying mission and told to bury it with dignity.

    What made him extraordinary was not that he succeeded—the mission closed, after all, on schedule at the end of February 1995. What made him extraordinary was how he succeeded. While other SRSGs brought strategic frameworks and Security Council mandates, Gbeho brought something rarer: intimate knowledge of how Somali clans actually breathed, fought, and traded. He had spent decades as a diplomat from a country that understood the weight of post-colonial fragility. He did not need to lecture Somalis about order; he needed to understand their chaos from the inside.

    I remember taking him to Bakara Market. Stolen UN equipment sat openly alongside everything else—desktops, laptops, radio parts, ration packs, the detritus of an intervention gone wrong. My team and I watched for his reaction, expecting outrage or at least exasperation. Instead, that surprising smile. He said nothing in the market. But back in his office, he burst out laughing—genuinely delighted—at the sheer ingenuity of Somalis. “They’ll sell you back your own boots,” he marvelled, “and you’ll thank them for the convenience.” That laugh was not cynicism; it was respect. He saw in Somali resilience not a problem to be solved but a reality to be worked with.

    That moment captured something essential about Gbeho. He understood that diplomacy in a place like Somalia could not afford the luxury of moral outrage. His job was not to judge but to navigate—and he navigated us through those final chaotic months without major loss of life, an achievement that history has largely failed to record. In those last seventy-two hours, as the mission collapsed into a frantic evacuation, he never raised his voice. He simply issued instructions, one after another, with the calm of a man who had already accepted every possible outcome.

    When he and I boarded the last aircraft out of Mogadishu, UNOSOM finally closed behind us. Sixteen years later, we met in Monrovia, Liberia, where he came as head of ECOWAS during Liberia’s general elections that year. Same quiet smile. Same thoughtful eyes that had seen everything and judged little. We did not speak of Somalia. We did not need to.

    Looking back, I realize what truly set him apart was his refusal to make any situation about himself. In an arena where egos routinely crushed consensus, Gbeho’s ego was invisible. He mentored not by lecturing but by example—showing me that a diplomat’s greatest weapon is the patience to let people arrive at their own solutions. He taught me that you do not win trust; you earn it, slowly, through hundreds of small moments of restraint.

    Ambassador James Victor Gbeho died on 13 June 2026. He was 91. But here is what his Wikipedia entry will never tell you: some men command by being large. He commanded by being present—fully, intelligently, quietly present—in rooms where everyone else was shouting.

    Rest in eternal peace, Ambassador. You were a great mentor and an exceptional leader. And I was privileged to have been on that last plane out of Mogadishu with you.