Courtesy of the pen of Charlie Charters.

A NON-EXHAUSTIVE … list of people who, imho, have contributed to the mess that Fiji Independent Commission Against Corruption – FICAC is in today.

The extent of that mess we can see clearly now following the collapse of the Manoa Kamikamica prosecution.

1. Lavi Rokoika. During my two nights in FICAC House I would listen to her barking instructions to her employees. She would call someone’s mobile who would set it to Speaker, so she could screech one set of instructions one time to everyone. All the key decisions were hers.

2. David Ashton-Lewis ‘SC’

3. Janet Mason [#2 and 3]. We will know more on August 10 but the COI process was so deeply flawed, and the motives of #2 and 3 so deeply compromised from the beginning, that the COI could only produce, in my assessment, deeply flawed conclusions.

Having her lost her solo practioner’s licence in 2015 and been suspended for a month last year, Mason is facing a third set of misconduct charges from her national law society, one of which she has already had to admit to.

That is simply staggering.

As we remember with Tony Stephens et al, the PM is loyal to his friends to a point beyond recklessness, of actual self-harm.

Far from fixing FICAC, which was their goal, they have helped to propel Fiji’s elite law enforcement agency off the edge of a cliff.

4. Chief Justice Salesi Temo for declining to attend, and therefore make quorate, a sequence of Judicial Services Commission meetings earlier this year when the JSC were ready to remove Rokoika

5. The Fiji Labour Party

6. Alex Forwood

7. Graham Davis

8. Rajendra Chaudhry [#5-8 for mindless, hysterical cheerleading of the COI Report and its recommendation as if it was an artefact from the Ark of the Covenant or a Holy Scripture]

9. Tevita Vakalalabure who, I am told, plays Lady Macbeth in this dynamic to his wife’s Macbeth

10. The Judicial Services Commission for not acting on a detailed whistleblower complaint in February against the acting FICAC Commissioner.

Where does a whistleblower go to blow the whistle on allegedly unlawful conduct inside FICAC?

11. Acting Attorney-General and Counsel from the Offices of the Attorney-General and Solicitor-General. Meant to provide the legal guardrails to limit the President and PM’s behaviour and did not.

12. The President, any opportunity taken to expand Cakaudrove’s influence and now paranoid that he may face removal as President in the course of the examining who did what in the weeks and months after the COI Report was published

13. Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka. Directly responsible for 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 11, 12 and 14. Allowed his leadership of the country to be completely captured by his subservient relationship to the Tui Cakau.

14. All of those Cabinet members, Coalition MPs and People’s Alliance leadership who knew, or should have known, what was going on from May 29 2025 onwards.

And that we would therefore end up where we are today:

– bullsh*t prosecutions, now collapsing all over the place;

– meantime the serious stuff doesn’t get done. No information on Walesi [files submitted in December 2024], Lautoka pool [two investigations 2019-2020 and April 2025], the Fiji Sports Council and how a crooked businessman owing the Govt $20m managed to evade a stop departure order.

The largest, most handsomely paid Cabinet in Fijis history sat on their hands and watched while Rabuka crashed the Constitution and unlawfully installed his kinsfolk to lead FICAC so that he could avenge past sleights against him or presumed future intrigues [aka ‘the crocodiles’].