08/10/2026
“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
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. 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
