Cover Story
Our Pacific Person Of The Year
Reverend Akuila Yabaki: The man they love to hate.
Reverend Akuila Yabaki, 60, a minister of the Methodist Church of Fiji, enjoys a quiet beer. In February he had a couple aboard an Air Pacific jet on the way home from Iran.
He had a few more at the Holiday Inn (former Centra Suva) in Suva on March 1. With supporters of the Citizens Constitutional Forum (CCF), of which he is executive director, he was celebrating a historic ruling in which the Fiji Court of Appeal declared that the liberal 1997 Constitution, claimed by the Fiji military after a coup in May 2000 to have been abrogated, remained in place. It was an epic victory for CCF, a vigorous and internationally supported civil society organisation, that has had an influential role in the restoration of democracy lost in 1987 and last year.
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Those beers had consequences for Akuila Yabaki that makes him Pacific Magazine's Person of the Year for 2001.
They were used by the church, for 150 years a massively influential part of indigenous Fijian society, as an excuse for exorcising a biting critic from its body.
Yabaki hasn't been exactly ex-communicated, but clearly some of the racist and nationalist bosses of the Methodist Church would like to be able to do that. Instead they've sacked him from the church in a most un-Christian way.
Since 1987 Yabaki has been a spear in the side of reactionary Methodist Church leaders who then, and last year, supported the overthrow of a democratic government by indigenous Fijian supremacists.
As executive director of the Citizens Constitutional Forum he's not loved by the newly elected government either. Nor by other targets he tilts at in the cause of restoring and maintaining democracy.
The trouble with his church, Yabaki says, is that its leadership is dominated by the past and indigenous Fijian culture at a time of dwindling support for it as Fijians are captured from it by new rival churches.
"It is still very much village-based and will guard its territory with tooth and nail. It resists any incursion from other religious groups."
"When you have no answer to the questions of modern life all you can do is fortify yourself. The church leans more to the protection of culture and is not very mindful of its responsibility on issues like, say, the constitution."
As he downed those beers Yabaki was being watched and reported on to the church's then president, Reverend Tomasi Kanailagi.
In May, a former Methodist Church president, Reverend Manasa Lasaro, and for years after the 1987 coup against the country's first Indian-dominated government a notable advocate of indigenous Fijian supremacy, had attacked the CCF and Yabaki's role in it as a sinister foreign-financed (one donor being the Methodist Church in Britain) conspiracy dedicated to the suppression of indigenous Fijian interests.
On June 11, Yabaki got a telephone call from the church's general secretary, Reverend Laisiasa Ratabacaca, asking him to come to the church headquarters. Yabaki asked: "What is it for?" "He put me on to the president, who said "for drinking alcohol."
"I said I want that in writing. I also raised with him the issue of his support for George Speight (the May 2000 coup leader) and he reacted defensively and slammed down the telephone."
"I picked up the phone and spoke to Ratabacaca. I told him I need something in writing."
"So I did get something in writing, and I also expressed my disgust about the president¹s telephone rudeness." On June 29, a standing committee of the church decided secretly to sack Yabaki from the church, allegedly for being a drunkard.
Yabaki's enemies followed up the move two months later by having that sacking confirmed by the annual Methodist Church conference.
On September 13, Yabaki, at his request, saw Kanailagi, Ratabacaca and a third critic, Reverend Jioni Langi, in the Methodist Church office in Suva. He wanted to give his side of the story, something he hadn't been asked for.
The reason for his dismissal was political, with alcohol used as an excuse, he protested. Later in the week Yabaki received a letter of dismissal.
"The word used was "vakacegui" - retired. So I wrote back and said if the word is intended to mean that I should be retired from the ministry, then I have no wish to observe it. But if you want to have my name removed from the Methodist ministry, then may I point out the following; that I came to the ministry through primarily having said yes to a call. This call was tested, this is what the church does. The church does not call you. It tests the call and proves it to be authentic through prayers and self explanation. So I was admitted to the ministry 35 years ago. This call cannot be undone." What is Yabaki's standing with the church? Does "vakacegui" amount to ex-communication?
"Ex-communication is not the right word. Ex-communication means you are not receiving communion."
"I am a minister, in the sense that it is not a profession like a lawyer, it is a vocation. My argument is that it cannot be taken away by a committee meeting behind closed doors."
"They're saying that I can't do anything, that I'm not on the Fijian planet."
Another of Yabaki's opponents is the Laisenia Qarase-led government, which after being formed as a caretaker administration after last year's, coup, was converted to respectability in September by a democratic election.
Last June, the government struck the CCF from the list of registered charities because, it said, it engaged in political activities contrary to the Charitable Trust Act under which it had been registered "by mistake".
Qarase, frustrated in his attempts to maintain the caretaker regime for at least two years, denounced the CCF as "constitutional zealots".
Pacific Magazine spoke to Yabaki in the CCF office, a hop and step away from Suva's Government Buildings.
He's not the sole voice of dissent in admonishing one of the monolith institutions of Fijian society to move with the times. Two of its recent presidents preached messages of reconciliation and repentance in hoping to repair the image of an institution damaged internationally when in 1987, in concert with the toppling of a new Indian-dominated government by army colonel Sitiveni Rabuka and defeated indigenous Fijian politicians, scores of Methodist ministers thundered support for the entrenchment of permanent Fijian political supremacy from their pulpits "They felt Rabuka was called to do that because everything is interpreted by them in terms of being chosen. Rabuka had been chosen to rescue a country which had fallen into the hands of others."
Yabaki, married with three children, is from Kadavu Island, 70 kilometres south of Suva.
He became a Methodist priest, he says, because he was drawn towards social questions rooted in the theology of the church's founder, John Wesley, concerning social holiness.
"Methodists were raised by God to spread scriptural holiness throughout the land. That to me is a sacred text. I feed on that. Scriptural holiness is about applying the word of God to people who live in their contemporary situation."
Yabaki's varied career as a churchperson includes an appointment with the Student Christian Movement during 1970-74 largely based at the University of the South Pacific and as a part time chaplain.
"Many of the people who are leaders of the country now are of my generation. I touch base with them."
He worked as minister for a church in London during 1979-85 at the request of the British Methodist Church.
"That made me realise that the whole world is becoming multiracial and multicultural. Wherever you go in the world you cannot escape multiculturalism, and the best thing is to learn the positive things about living alongside people."
"That is part of the work of the church. It is very close to the heart of the gospel; how Jesus dealt with people from other cultures. That to me is very important for the church to bring out."
In 1986 he became communications secretary for the church in Suva with the main job of editing a bilingual paper. It was then he ran foul of the Fiji church's deep conservatism.
"My paper was taking a position against Rabuka¹s coup and how the church was accepting that as God-given. Because I was speaking for the minority, I was not speaking with the voice of the church."
Disapproving church leaders encouraged him to leave to become secretary for the Pacific Conference of Churches. Later he returned to London as World Church secretary for Asia and the Pacific from 1990 to 1999.
He returned to Fiji just before the 1999 election, which gave the country its first Indian prime minister. A year later there was another coup.
Last year the Methodist Church was "more enlightened", he says. "Dr Ilaitia Tuwere was its president. He was able to take a more theological reflection on the role of the church in the crisis. He thought it was an opportunity for the church to ask searching questions about the relationship between the church and Fijian culture; that the church should be free of tutelage by the Fijian hierarchy. He left and the people who took over did not have that view."
The church, Yabaki says, is back under the control of people who supported the coup in 1987. "They are not as strong as they were. They felt the Methodist church should follow the leading of traditional Fijian leaders and they cannot think about the church in any other way."
They are happy with that kind of linkage with culture, and see it as the strength of the church.
"Now the church has nothing to say. It has difficulty in finding things to say in modern Fiji. There is absolutely no alternative thinking."
Yabaki was asked by the church if he would appeal to be reinstated.
"Not if only the condition is the giving up of drinking alcohol. Why should one be made to give up something which can be enjoyed and which is not harmful if taken with self-control?" How many other Methodist ministers drink alcohol? "Quite a few."
How many are addicts of kava? "It's quite serious."
When Yabaki saw Kanailagi in September he took with him a paper he had written on the church and alcohol.
"I said there was a choice to be moderate, and that Fijian kava must be viewed on the same lines because it is equally destructive."
"Kanailagi said he would present the paper to the standing committee. But I think when they read that, they decided to cut short the process and sack me."
Yabaki has asked the churchmen who condemned him to adopt a recognised disciplinary procedure "not so much out of judgment but out of grace. This is an appeal for good practice."
"Second, I wanted to appeal to the courts against processes lacking in natural justice because I was not heard."
What was his detractors' response? Yabaki chuckled. They said, "you had better come back to the church".
What next? "I have a lawyer looking at these things. I don't feel a loss of anything. The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not want. I am quite satisfied. I've led a fairly true life. In terms of my faith, as I've said before, it is the application of the Christian faith into practice. I feel I'm leading a full life."
