The Bar and the Exemption

Part Two of the series: What the Law Actually Says

The reconstituted Great Council of Chiefs has, for the first time written its apolitical aspiration into law, barring party office-holders from its chiefly seats. The provision is significant. So is what it leaves untouched.

In 2001, the Great Council of Chiefs took two unprecedented decisions. It dismissed Sitiveni Rabuka from its chairmanship amid allegations of his involvement in the 2000 coup. Rabuka was the coup leader from 1987, a former Prime Minister, and the man whose post-1987 restructuring had entrenched chiefly authority in the GCC. The Council also severed its formal ties with the Soqosoqo ni Vakavulewa ni Taukei party, which the GCC itself had sponsored into existence in the early 1990s to protect and promote chiefly and indigenous interests in Parliament. It declared its intention to eschew party politics entirely going forward.

It took twenty-three years for that declaration to become law.

 The iTaukei Affairs (Great Council of Chiefs) Regulations 2024, gazetted on 26 February 2024, include among their disqualification provisions the following: a person is not eligible to be a member of the Council if they are an office holder of a political party. This is Regulation 6(d), and it is new. No equivalent provision existed in any prior GCC regulatory framework. The GCC's apolitical aspiration, announced by resolution in 2001 and held as institutional intention for two decades, is now a statutory disqualification. The provision is the most structurally significant change in the reconstituted GCC: more consequential, in governance terms, than the membership numbers, the tenure arrangements, or the body's purely advisory function. It attempts to do what the institution has been trying and failing to do since the late 1980s: place a legal barrier between the GCC and the partisan politics that compromised it so badly and so repeatedly that it became one of the primary justifications for its abolition in 2012.

 The entanglement the bar is designed to end

Understanding what Regulation 6(d) is trying to fix requires understanding how thoroughly politics and the GCC became enmeshed. The GCC's sponsorship of the SVT in the early 1990s was not a passive association. Following the 1987 coups, under a new constitution that dramatically expanded the GCC's formal powers (including authority to appoint the President and dominate the Senate), the Council effectively became a pillar of the indigenous political establishment. Its nominees had shaped the colonial parliament; now it shaped the post-independence one. The consequences were not what the chiefs intended. The SVT fragmented under factional pressure. By 1999, it was swept from government. The 2000 coup that followed drew GCC members into its orbit, including, allegedly, the GCC's own chairman. After the 2006 coup, the GCC refused to legitimise the military takeover and paid for it: Bainimarama suspended the Council in 2007, then formally abolished it by decree in 2012, citing its politicisation as a primary justification. For sixteen years, the Bose Levu Vakaturaga did not meet.

 When the GCC review committee conducted its public consultations ahead of the 2023 reconstitution, the question of political entanglement was central. The committee's recommendation was unambiguous: members should be apolitical. The criterion, it noted, would effectively exclude MPs from both sides of Parliament, as well as Ministers and Assistant Ministers, from membership in the GCC. The review recommended instead that Ministers and MPs attend as ex-officio members: present, able to inform and implement, but not voting members drawn from the chiefly rolls. That architecture is precisely what the 2024 Regulations adopt.

 GCC chairman Ratu Viliame Seruvakula, elected to the position on 28 February 2024, has been direct about the stakes. Speaking to reporters shortly after his election, he said: 'That is why from the outset we said we will now have a GCC that is apolitical because they will not be involved in politics. No longer will the GCC be used as a rubber stamp for political means.'

 What the provision does, and does not, cover

Regulation 6(d) bars any 'office holder of a political party' from GCC membership. The Regulations do not define what an office holder is. Fiji's Political Parties (Registration, Conduct, Funding and Disclosures) Act 2013 governs party registration and conduct, but whether its provisions supply a working definition of 'office holder' for the purposes of Regulation 6(d) is a question that has not, so far as is publicly known, been formally tested. At what level of party organisation does a position become a disqualifying office? A branch chairperson? A provincial party executive? A national committee member? The silence of the Regulations on this point is a potential enforcement gap.

 What is clear is the category of person the bar is aimed at: chiefs who hold formal leadership positions within registered political parties and who would otherwise be eligible for provincial GCC membership. The forty-two provincial seats (three from each of Fiji's fourteen provinces, nominated by each Bose Vanua) are the seats the provision targets. A chief who holds a party office must choose between that office and their GCC seat. The provision does not affect individual political beliefs, party membership, or the right to vote. It goes specifically to formal organisational authority within a party.

 The exemption the provision creates

This is where the architecture becomes complicated. Regulation 3(1)(a) of the 2024 Regulations establishes three ex-officio members of the GCC: the President, the Prime Minister, and the Minister for iTaukei Affairs. Ex-officio members hold their seats by virtue of the office they hold, not by nomination from a Bose Vanua. They are explicitly not subject to the Regulation 6(d) bar. The consequence is significant. The three positions most embedded in the national political apparatus (the head of state, the head of government, and the minister responsible for iTaukei affairs) sit in the GCC as of right, regardless of their relationship with political parties. The forty-two hereditary chiefly seats are depoliticised by law. The executive seats are not.

 Consider what this means in practice. Sitiveni Rabuka sits in the GCC as Prime Minister. He is also confirmed by DFAT as the leader of the People's Alliance Party. He is simultaneously an ex-officio GCC member and the leader of a registered political party. Regulation 6(d) does not touch him because he is not a provincial nominee. The Regulation was not designed to touch him: the review committee's own recommendation was that Ministers and MPs should attend as ex-officio members, and Rabuka attends precisely in that capacity.

 This is not a loophole in any straightforward sense. It is a deliberate design choice. The review committee understood that a government minister must be present in the GCC to inform it of policy and to implement its recommendations. Excluding the executive entirely would have created a GCC that received no information from the government and had no channel for its advice to flow back. The ex-officio category is the mechanism that solves this problem. Its costs are the paradox it creates.

The paradox the architecture produces

The GCC is simultaneously the most formally apolitical it has ever been in its chiefly composition, and the most structurally embedded in partisan politics through the seats that set its agenda, call its meetings, and control what reaches Parliament.

Under Regulation 10, GCC meetings are called by the Minister by notice in the Gazette. Under the amended iTaukei Affairs Act, the Minister refers questions to the GCC, and the GCC's secretariat submits reports back to the Minister. The ex-officio members are not peripheral to the GCC's institutional function. They are its primary interface with the government machinery the GCC exists to advise. The forty-two chiefs who are now statutorily required to be apolitical deliberate within a framework set by, reported to, and called to meet by active partisan politicians.

 Mahendra Chaudhry named the historical dimension of this directly when the GCC met in February 2024 to elect its chairman. He said the GCC should protect itself from becoming, yet again, a tool in the hands of those seeking political dominance, and pointed to the institution's role in supporting the coups of 1987 and 2000 as evidence of what political capture looks like in practice. His concern was about the chairmanship specifically. He argued that contestants closely associated with party politics should be disqualified from that position. The Regulations do not disqualify the chairman from party association because the chairman is elected from among the GCC's members, and ex officio members are not barred from party association. A chairman elected from the ex-officio ranks could, in theory, be an active party leader.

 In practice, Ratu Viliame Seruvakula, a former military officer with no current party affiliation, was elected chairman. His commitment to apoliticism is stated and appears genuine. But institutional character depends on more than the intentions of the person who currently holds the chair. It depends on the rules that govern the institution when the chair changes, when political pressures intensify, and when the interests of the executive and the GCC diverge. On those questions, the 2024 Regulations offer only a partial answer.

 What has been achieved, and what remains open

Regulation 6(d) is a genuine achievement. Codifying in law something the GCC attempted by resolution in 2001 and failed to hold through the years that followed is not a small thing. It removes from the chiefly membership the most direct form of partisan influence: the ability of a party apparatus to place its own office-holders in the institutional core of iTaukei advisory governance. Chiefs who hold the forty-two provincial seats cannot simultaneously run a party branch or sit on a party executive. That boundary is now enforceable rather than merely aspirational.

 What the provision does not resolve is the structural relationship between the GCC and the partisan executive that frames its work. The ex-officio exemption is a practical necessity, not a governance failure. But it produces an institution whose formal independence sits in its chiefly seats while its institutional infrastructure remains in the hands of the government of the day. Whether that balance is adequate depends on questions the Regulations do not answer: how disputes between the GCC's chiefly members and the ex-officio executive are resolved, what happens when a GCC recommendation conflicts with government policy, and whether any future government could use the ministerial agenda-setting power to manage what the GCC considers and what it does not.

 The GCC's abolition in 2012 was justified, in part, on the grounds that it had become an instrument of political manipulation. The 2024 Regulations attempt to prevent that from happening again by removing partisanship from the chiefly seats. They leave in place the architecture through which a government, if it chose, could still shape what the GCC sees, when it meets, and whose advice reaches the Minister's desk. That is not the same thing as political manipulation. But it is a structural proximity to executive power that the provision's own logic, if followed to its conclusion, would need to account for.

 Twenty-three years passed between the GCC's 2001 resolution to be apolitical and the law that codified it. The resulting provision is a significant step. Whether it is a sufficient one will depend on how the ex-officio architecture operates in practice, and on whether a future government finds that the agenda-setting powers the Minister holds are compatible with the independent advisory body the Regulations describe.

SOURCES

Primary legislation: iTaukei Affairs (Great Council of Chiefs) Regulations 2024, gazetted 26 February 2024. Regulation 6(d) and Regulation 3(1)(a) cited from full text.

Seruvakula on apoliticism: RNZ Pacific Q&A, March 2024; RNZ Pacific, March 2024.

GCC review committee, apolitical recommendation: Fiji Sun, 26 September 2023.

Chaudhry on political dominance and coups: FijiLive, 28 February 2024; Fiji Sun, 29 February 2024.

Rabuka as People's Alliance leader; ex-officio bar: DFAT Country Information Report Fiji, October 2025.

Chiefly title disputes and GCC abolition 2012: Bainimarama de-establishment statement, March 2012; Morgan Tuimaleali'ifano, ANU Press, 2007.

 Confirmed gap: 'Office holder' is not defined in the 2024 Regulations. Whether the Political Parties (Registration, Conduct, Funding and Disclosures) Act 2013 supplies a working definition for Reg 6(d) has not been publicly tested.