Partnership between The People’s Alliance (PA) and National Federation Party (NFP) will never work because of ulterior motives.

This is what SODELPA provisional candidate Seremaia Tuiteci believes. Mr Tuiteci said the two parties had a hidden agenda.

He said the former NFP provisional candidate, Hiroshi Taniguchi, whose candidacy was revoked, was made a scapegoat to appease The People’s Alliance.

Mr Taniguchi had talked about downsizing the civil service and changing land management, taxation and other policy areas on his website.

Mr Tuiteci said Mr Taniguchi’s plans toto expel 20 per cent of civil servants were, in reality, implemented by PA leader Sitiveni Rabuka, in 1994.

“As far as I am concerned, only stupid people should vote for them. They have a different ulterior motive.”

They have not talked about policies they will co-operate with. When Rabuka is quiet we really cannot tell his views on policies.

Hiroshi is talking about what Rabuka did in 1994, but it will never work,” Mr Tuiteci said.

“We are a democratic country. And when you go to Government you are to serve and not to gain profit.”

He claimed that in the past Mr Rabuka had implemented the downsizing of civil service, which was presented as right-sizing in 1994.

“If one looks back at Rabuka’s tenure ship as Prime Minister from 1992 to 1999, it was him who started what was then known as the Zero Growth Policy of the Civil Service, where it became a Government stand not to increase the size of civil service,” Mr Tuiteci alleged.

“Rabuka, through his then Finance Minister, also introduced the public sector reform policy where corporatization was the key in which Government-controlled companies were corporatised, beginning with Telecom in 1994, with Winston Thompson, as its first chief executive officer.”

“One of the most cruel and inhumane of them all was the ‘rightsizing’, as it was called, of the civil service, the reduction in its numbers to keep civil service costs in check.”

“The most notorious was the closure of the Government slipway and shipyard in Walu Bay where over 7000 employees of mostly indigenous Fijians were laid off,” Mr Tuiteci claimed.

“So, if this is the way PA is anticipating to rule, social chaos and upheaval will naturally be Fiji’s public sector scenario.”

When NFP leader Biman Prasad was contacted yesterday, he hung up when he learned it was from the Fiji Sun.

He did not answer the call in the Fiji Sun’s second attempt to get a comment.

Several calls to Mr Rabuka yesterday to verify the claims made by Mr Tuiteci remained unanswered when this edition went to press.

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