An interesting read on the fijitoday blog that pinpoints what a number of people have been saying all along. The coups were not about Fiji, removing corruption or being more transparent.
.......There was a lot of after-the-fact justifying of why the coups were necessary: the easiest to understand narrative was that Fijians/i Taukei had not had fair access to the economic benefits of the country, and therefore the coups happened as a logical consequence of that disenfranchisement. ......The real motivation behind those coups (and subsequent) was that there existed in Fiji a tightly associated clan of business and political figures who felt an overweening sense of entitlement, and whose jobs for life were threatened by the Bavadra victory in April 1987. It was that unholy alliance of Coup-Enablers that conspired to create the circumstances that delivered 1987, 2000 and 2006. Certainly there was and remains a huge number of Fijians/i Taukei who feel marginalised and passed over by the many and conspicuous benefits of development (electricity, piped water etc.). But these same disadvantaged people did not lead the coups; the coups were not mass uprisings (along the lines of the Arab Spring); all four coups were events of huge national significance (and great long-lasting economic damage) that were done in all our names but by a tiny few who self-selected themselves based on what they feared they had to lose, and who subsequently have enjoyed the huge trappings that come with high political office, salary, entitlements, pensions, or in the case of the cabal of business leaders, have enjoyed preferential tariff protection, access to loans, etc.
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