A Fiji Day Message from Savenaca Narube, leader of Unity Fiji

“Tomorrow, we mark 56 years since Fiji became an independent nation. On 10 October  1970, our founding leaders raised our flag with a promise that this would be a country  where every citizen could live with dignity, opportunity, and freedom. On behalf of Unity  Fiji, I wish every Fijian a blessed Fiji Day. 

In past Fiji Day messages, I have tried to put a positive spin on the future of the country. But for this Fiji Day message I have chosen to change tact to reflect the daunting  challenges that the country faces. I think that Fiji day must also be a day of national  honesty. We cannot celebrate independence while glossing over the struggles so many  of our people face. These struggles are getting heavier. Fifty-six years on, we must ask  whether that founding promise is being kept. Tragically, for too many families and for too  long, the answer is no. 

The Cost of Living Crisis 

I walk through any market or supermarket and I hear and see the same story. Families  are paying more for rice, flour, tinned fish, fuel, and bus fares, while wages have not kept  pace. Parents are skipping meals so their children can eat. Pensioners are choosing  between medicine and electricity. These are not statistics. They are our neighbours, our  relatives, and our friends. 

Those in power will speak of how well they have performed, but progress that does not  reach the kitchen table means little to the family struggling to get through the week.  Fijians deserve leaders who feel the pressure ordinary people feel, not leaders who  explain it away. 

Our Young People Are Leaving

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Every week, more of our nurses, doctors, teachers, tradespeople, and graduates board  planes for Australia, New Zealand, and beyond. We are proud of them, but we must be  honest about why they go. They leave because they cannot see a future here: wages too  low, opportunities too few, and very importantly, too little reason to believe things will  change. 

When a nation loses its skilled workers, it loses its hospitals, its classrooms, and its  future. This is not simply a trend to be noted in reports. It is a national emergency that  demands urgent, serious action, and it has not received it. 

A Health System Under Strain 

Fijians are waiting too long for medical care, travelling too far to receive it, and too often  finding shortages of medicine and staff when they arrive. I feel for the rural and maritime  communities who feel this most of all. No Fijian should lose a loved one because the  system meant to protect them was stretched beyond breaking point. Our health workers  do heroic work under impossible conditions. They deserve better support, and so do the  patients they serve. 

The Drug Crisis 

Hard drugs are tearing through our communities, our schools, and our villages. Families  are watching their sons and daughters disappear into drug addiction, and HIV infections  linked to drug use. The response so far has been too slow and too fragmented. We need  

stronger border control, a serious push to fight corruption, real investment in  rehabilitation, and a national strategy that treats this as the crisis it is, not a problem for  next year. 

Accountability and Trust 

Independence was meant to give Fijians the power to hold their leaders to account. That  power depends on transparency, an independent judiciary, a free media, and  institutions that serve the people rather than those in office. When public money is  wasted, when appointments raise questions of fairness, and when promises made at  election time are quietly forgotten, public trust erodes. 

Fijians are not asking for perfection. We are asking for honesty, and we have every right  to expect it. 

Our Commitment 

I am not raising these issues to divide us. I raise them because loving your country  means telling the truth about it. Fiji's diversity remains Unity Fiji’s mission and the  country’s greatest strength, and these struggles cut across every community and every  faith. 

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We commit to an economy that rewards work and eases the burden on households, to  bringing our young people home by creating real opportunities here, to rebuilding our  health system, to confronting the drug crisis head-on, and to leadership that is open,  accountable, and answerable to the people. 

A Call to Every Fijian 

This Fiji Day, as we share and celebrate with family, let us honour those who built this  nation by demanding a better country for those who will inherit it. Speak up. Stay  informed. Hold every leader, including me, to account. Independence was not a gift  handed down once; it is a responsibility each generation must carry. 

From all of us at Unity Fiji, we wish you a safe and meaningful Fiji Day. I firmly believe  that our best days can still be ahead of us, if we have the courage to face the truth and  the will to change it. 

God bless Fiji. 

Vinaka vakalevu.” 

Savenaca Narube 

Leader of Unity Fiji