Tag: artificial-intelligence

• Digital Sovereignty in the Age of AI: Why the Pasifika Must Send Its Best to Both Superpowers

  A quiet scandal sits inside Fiji’s immigration system. Every passport application, every visa, every piece of sensitive biometric data from Fijian citizens is collected through Jotforms—an American‑owned platform run by a Turkish national, hosted on foreign servers beyond our legal reach. Worse, just months ago, the system failed to open because it had “run out of paid or free quota.” A national border function, reduced to a cloud subscription.

  This is not sovereignty. This is digital negligence.

  Yet when someone points out that China’s open‑source AI revolution offers an alternative path—that models like DeepSeek are now neck‑and‑neck with America’s best, and freely available for any nation to download, inspect, and run locally—the response is sometimes dismissive: “Another DeepSeek preacher.”

  That dismissal misses the point entirely. Observing a strategic shift in global technology is not preaching. It is prudence. The real question is not whether to trust China or the United States. It is how a small Pasifika nation navigates between two superpowers without becoming a vassal of either.

  The Jotforms Lesson: Dependency Is Dangerous

  Our current reliance on Jotforms is a perfect example of what happens when no one is paying attention. We handed our citizens’ most sensitive data to a closed‑source, foreign‑controlled platform with no transparency, no local audit, and no fallback when the quota ran out. Where are our local IT geniuses? They are here—graduating from USP, from FNU, from our technical colleges. But they have never been given a strategic mission or the political backing to build national systems from scratch.

  The answer, however, is not to replace American dependency with Chinese dependency. That would be the same mistake, just a different flag. A Chinese cloud platform holding our passport data is no more sovereign than an American one.

  Non‑Alignment in the Age of AI

  For decades, Pasifika nations have practised geopolitical non‑alignment—engaging with Washington, Beijing, Canberra, and Tokyo on our own terms, refusing to be pawns in anyone’s cold war. We need the same doctrine for artificial intelligence.

  China’s open‑source AI models are a powerful tool precisely because they are open. We can download DeepSeek, run it on our own servers, modify it for our languages and needs, and never send a single citizen’s data across an undersea cable. That is fundamentally different from closed‑source American platforms like Jotforms, OpenAI, or Google Cloud, where the code is secret and the data leaves our jurisdiction.

  But the United States still leads in foundational research, chip design, and private investment. American universities like MIT—where young Penioni Narube from Cuvu Village is heading—remain world leaders. To ignore American AI would be as foolish as ignoring Chinese AI.

  A responsible Pasifika government sends its best to both.

  Three Concrete Steps

  1. Audit and reclaim. Conduct an immediate audit of every foreign digital service holding citizen data—Jotforms included. Migrate critical systems to open‑source, locally‑hosted alternatives using code from any nation, but always under our own physical and legal control.
  2. Send our best to both. Establish scholarships and exchange programs with both MIT and Tsinghua University, Stanford and Zhejiang University. Let our brightest software engineers learn AI from every major power, then return to build regional capacity.
  3. Declare digital non‑alignment. Adopt a formal policy that no exclusive cloud or AI agreement will be signed with any single country. Build interoperability, redundancy, and choice into every government system. Small nations survive by keeping options open.

  The Cost of Doing Nothing

  If we continue on our current path, we will wake up in five years to find our government data scattered across half a dozen foreign cloud platforms, our citizens’ faces and fingerprints held in servers we cannot inspect, and our AI future dictated by whichever superpower offers the cheapest subscription.

  That is not sovereignty. That is a quiet surrender.

  The open‑source AI revolution—accelerated by China’s DeepSeek—is not a reason to abandon caution. It is a reason to act. The tools are free. The talent is here. The only missing ingredient is the courage to take a shot, just as a young man from Cuvu did.

  Let us honour his journey by building a Pasifika that no longer needs to send its data abroad. Let us send our best to both superpowers—and then bring them home to build for ourselves.

  2026.05.15

• The Bitter Truth: It’s Time for Fiji to Let Go of its Sugar Daddy and Embrace a Real Future

  For over 160 years, the sugar industry has been more than just an economic activity in Fiji; it has been a national identity, a political football, and a colonial ghost that refuses to leave. But the question we must now courageously ask is this: Are we preserving a vital national asset, or are we clinging to a monument of historical injustice that is haemorrhaging money and holding the nation back?

  The case for the prosecution is damning. The industry is a relic of a colonial paternalistic system designed to keep iTaukei in their villages while their land was used to generate wealth for others. Today, it is economically unviable. We cannot compete with the giants of Brazil, Australia, and India. The government subsidises it to the tune of millions annually to sustain an ever-shrinking number of farmers and workers in what can only be described as indentured servitude to a dying trade.

  The opportunity cost is staggering. While FSC buys sugar at F$100 per tonne, commodities like kava command up to $120,000 per tonne. Our land, cursed by generations of chemical runoff, could be nurturing high-value, sustainable crops. Instead, we pour good money after bad, perpetuating a cycle of poverty for the very iTaukei landowners who should be the primary beneficiaries of their own vanua.

  So, why does it persist? The answer is the political elephant in the room. It is a failure of courage that mirrors a broader paralysis in our governance.

  This same lack of strategic bravery is painfully evident in our approach to the digital future. The government proudly touts a National Digital Strategy, 5G networks, and a Google Data Centre. Yet, these achievements risk being a veneer of progress. After nearly three years, the government has been unable to cancel an exorbitant contract with a foreign IT company that effectively holds our country’s critical data hostage. We have, as noted, lost our data sovereignty—a modern-day echo of the economic sovereignty we surrendered in the sugar industry.

  This failure has real consequences. While we host IT conferences that are “barely disguised vendor exhibitions,” our municipal councils remain stuck in the past, crippled by political indecision on local government reform. How can we talk about a FinTech Hub when we cannot digitise basic local services? Our budding BPO industry in Valelevu, a potential source of jobs, is already at risk of being decimated by AI, a threat we are simply not ready for. We are trying to build a skyscraper on a foundation of sand.

  But if not sugar, then what? This is where our vision must expand beyond replacing one crop with another, and confront our technological inertia head-on.

  Yes, agricultural diversification is a critical first step. We must empower landowners to transition to high-margin products. However, the most profound transformation lies not solely in the soil, but in the mind. With AI reshaping the global economy, our goal cannot be to create only a new generation of farmers, but to create a generation of innovators.

  Our investment must be a courageous, dual-track mission:

  1. Agricultural Justice: A managed, just transition out of sugar. This means direct investment in landowners and retraining for farmers, not as a handout, but as a capital injection for a new beginning, breaking the colonial cycle for good.
  2. Digital Sovereignty: A concurrent, ruthless prioritisation of genuine digital governance. This starts with reclaiming control of our national data and infrastructure. It means moving beyond glossy strategies to implementing practical IT systems that improve lives, and—critically—launching a national upskilling program focused on AI literacy. We must prepare our youth not to be displaced by AI, but to harness it.

  Saving the sugar industry is an act of confinement. Similarly, clinging to outdated IT contracts and superficial digital projects is a betrayal of our future potential. It chains us to past weaknesses.

  The choice is clear: we can continue to be custodians of a dying, 160-year-old legacy and a shaky digital facade, or we can become the architects of a new Fiji. One that honours its people by finally giving them the tools—both agricultural and digital—to thrive in the 21st century. The political courage to break these twin cycles of dependency will define our nation for generations to come. It is time to stop feeding the elephants in the room and start building for the future.

  2025.09.22