Dakuvula slates NLTB Issue

Dakuvula slates NLTB Issue

No: 280 12 December 2000

SVT member and pro-democracy campaigner, Jone Dakuvula has slated the NLTB for trying to install another Girmit in Fiji.

In a column he wrote in today's Fiji Sun, Dakuvula stated that the NLTB, in league with Apisai Tora, was carrying on with a political agenda to depose the elected government. It had no believable arrangement with Fijian landowners for the continuation of cane farming.

Dakuvula writes: "Tens of thousands of cane farms are very likely to revert to bush in the next three years". He says that the NLTB believes that the evicted farmers should be prepared to start again on undeveloped land yet to be identified. "But hardly any of these old farmers are in a position physically or financially to embark on another NLTB inspired GIRMIT". Dakuvula advises the NLTB to "go and see Lauan leaseholders in Lomaivuna who are preparing to return to their villages when the Naitasiri landowners reclaim their land. They do not want to start all over again".

Dakuvula says that the NLTB is led by people who have no business skills; instead they are led by blind nationalism. He says that the "nation will not survive on the basis of indigenous nationalism".

Meanwhile, today's Daily Post has also condemned the NLTB for not heeding the calls for reconciliation by continuing to evict farmers despite the willingness of the landowners to lease their land to the farmers.

END 12 December 2000

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