There are organisations, like Leadership Fiji, which perform a great service for society by trying to encourage young people to take up leadership roles in society- in all the areas that leaders are needed: economics, political, social, environment, etc.

I am not sure what they are doing these days: I used to be requested to speak (usually on economic policy issues) but those invitations stopped soon after the media censorship kicked in and I became persona non grata in the Fiji media.

I wonder however if Leadership Fiji (or other leadership programs) have ever have asked their young leaders to identify the FAILURES OF LEADERSHIP IN FIJI.

And surely, the bigger the mess any country is in, the bigger is the failure of leadership at various levels!

Of course, it would be difficult for the organisers to get their young people to confront such contentious issues in the current climate- they may soon find their program shut down or the organizers given free unplanned exercise around some playground somewhere.

However, one exercise they could set their young participants is to have closed sessions, without any organizers, under “Chatham House rules” (i.e. all discussions are unrecorded and confidential to the participants only) to discuss this very topic- what are all the failures of leadership in Fiji; and what should and can be done to help Fiji out of its current morass.

They might also like to do a tracer study of all their previous “young leaders” and find out how many still remain in Fiji. Or have the bulk of them also, like all our other tertiary graduates, taken their leaderships skills to Australia, NZ, US and Canada?

Professor Wadan Narsey
6 March 2013.