'He has to go now, his days are gone; power is not going to return his way and he is now in the business of wrecking the future for those who could make a difference.'


Beware of the politician who thinks he or she is indispensable; especially if his name is Mahendra Chaudhry, the struggling leader of the Fiji Labour Party.

He has to go now, his days are gone; power is not going to return his way and he is now in the business of wrecking the future for those who could make a difference.

We are not going to deny his courage or his raw political skill, which has seen him mould the FLP into a personal instrument. But his continued leadership of it in the face of very serious reservations is now a problem, not only for Labour but also for Fiji.

Mr Chaudhry is very much a man for another age and time; back when union power meant something and the sugar plantations were Fiji’s future.

But Fiji has changed and a new generation of younger, smarter people are graduating into the political world. They have university degrees and a different sense of nationality and government.

Mr Chaudhry remains a “them-against-us” politician. Fiji has had too much of that, and wants change.

The new multiparty cabinet that followed the election with its solid FLP membership is not just some casual patch-up arrangement to carry the country through to the next election. It is a constitutionally enshrined device aimed at overcoming the racial divide. Whether it is a good thing or not is beside the point; the country’s stability is fixed to it and it has to work.

Mr Chaudhry, who swears by the constitution when it suits him, has found himself left outside in the rain, pressing his nose against the windowpane struggling to get noticed.

Now, for personal aggrandisement reasons alone, Mr Chaudhry wants to tear the whole edifice down.

His arrogance is stunning, as was witnessed in his behaviour over the FLP senate appointments.

He acted as if it was his personal favour, failing to recognise the incredible sense of duty and service implicit in a senate appointment. When people had the nerve to ask what was going on, Mr Chaudhry then wandered off on one of his legendary and pointless overseas trips, while getting party lackeys to mutter words like investigation, firing and sacking.

It seems plain that the aging and inept Mr Chaudhry is now trying to turn the FLP into his family heirloom, grooming his son for it. The unelectable Rajendra Chaudhry, who played a key role in the demise of the party’s standing in 1999, is now returning to the same hectoring, bullying ways.

For many people this travesty of politics barely matters; if the FLP falls apart, so much the better perhaps. But the fact is that the Westminster democracy requires a lively opposition.

Fiji does not have that now; it has an ailing party monarch desperately hanging on to his tattered throne.

The final, decisive reason why Mr Chaudhry must go now is a very simple one; he is a loser. Repeatedly.

Yes, he led a landslide victory in 1999 but his solitary year in power was marked with a number of monumental lapses in judgment, not least of which was to ignore and fail to act on the signs of a coup that did come. For years, he has managed to shift the blame, saying the police told him everything was fine. Well, it wasn’t. It’s plainly no justification for the coup and without wanting to speculate on the great “what ifs” of Fiji politics, a more skilful politician may have been able to avoid the crisis. He failed the big test; what Fiji might have been had he more manfully handled it.

He acted with courage and strength as a hostage and then frittered away the moral high ground in a series of dubious overseas trips.

Worse of all—from a political point of view—Mr Chaudhry lost two more general elections in 2001 and 2006. To add to the indignity of it all, he lost to a political novice, Laisenia Qarase.