The UK is assisting Tonga to send a contingent of 275 soldiers to Afghanistan over the next two years. They will help guard Britain’s Camp Bastion in Helmand Province. This will provide much needed assistance to Tonga in finding employment for its youth. Who knows, maybe this will also help build a capacity to replace the FMF peacekeeping deployments? Everybody knows that this is the key to ending the destructive influence of the FMF as a source of government instability, economic collapse and poverty.

On 15 July, two weeks ago, the Fiji Labour Party website reported that the Rarawai mill may be forced to close. Now FSC management has been forced to admit that this is true. They knew it all the time but the consistent strategy of this regime is to peddle lies, hoping that the truth can remain hidden. But how long can they hide the fact that a sugar mill is not working? How long can they expect to hide that this harvest will probably yield only a little more than 100,000 tonnes of sugar? Will the FLP website again prove to know the truth? It’s no wonder Chaudhry has been charged.

FSC senior management thought they were very smart when they had all the bodies that provided democracy in the sugar industry abolished by the dictator, but the end result has been every FSC manager thinks he’s got a charter to be a petty tyrant as well. There is no trust and no communication between FSC and cane farmers. As a result, we seem to be having the worst harvest of all time. Who knows how small the harvest will be?

A release from the Fiji Trade and Investment Bureau is boasting about investments of $368.1 million for the first six months of this year. What they don’t say, but anyone with a calculator can check, is that this is barely 15 percent of Gross Domestic Product, the same very low level our economy has managed after the coup in late 2006 killed investment. Even worse, it’s obvious that the figure from the FTIB includes promises of what is going to happen, not investments that have actually been put in place.