OPPOSITION parliamentarian Ro Filipe Tuisawau yesterday asked Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama whether Fiji was a democracy or a dictatorship.
“You need to tell us right now, where are we moving to with this kind of abuse of the process of law and they were not even given due process to respond or to get a lawyer and they need to answer the situation right now,” he asked during debate on the University of the South Pacific 2017 annual report.
Ro Filipe was referring to the forceful removal of USP vice-chancellor Professor Pal Ahluwalia and his wife Sandra Price from their home, and deportated the following morning. He said the underhand actions were done because Government could not accept the VC’s role as a whistleblower.
“In relation to the financial report and the issues been mentioned on good governance, I think the fundamental problem here is that the other side of the House cannot accept that Prof Pal is a whistleblower.
“He is a whistleblower and you have a whistleblower in every organisation, so why don’t you accept what he reported?
“Is it because some of what he reported is part of your Fiji First?” He said the whole USP saga was not the way Pacific people conducted their affairs.
“Here they (Government) talk about Pacific unity but their actions — you only read about those things in the Middle East, Iraq — so what is our country coming to? Are we in a democracy or are we in a dictatorship?
“Please refrain from moving to total dictatorship, we are going into election and refrain from deporting people in the middle of the night or arresting them as we as a nation we need seriously, some of you are laughing but for our citizens it was a very disturbing thing.”
