Monitoring Desk
SUVA, FIJI: Sitiveni “Rambo” Rabuka an ex-soldier and former international sportsman, has returned to power as prime minister of Fiji after a 23-year break.
He has become Fiji’s 12th PM, ending a tense political stalemate that had gripped the small Pacific island nation following an undecisive election outcome in December. The country’s Parliament convened on Saturday in the capital Suva to vote in Rabuka, who is now holding the prime minister’s job for a second time.
Rabuka turns 75 in September 2023, but used TikTok to reach young voters during the election — flexing his arm muscles in a training singlet in one popular clip. Someone asked him, ‘Do you ever lift, bro? He said he used to but then he was more interested in lifting the standard of this country.”
Rabuka, now 74, was a natural athlete and a powerful all-rounder in his youth. He represented his country in the shot put, discus, hammer throw, and decathlon at the 1974 Commonwealth Games. He scrummed down as a prop forward for the Fiji’s rugby team. But Rabuka is perhaps more famous for inciting someone for two coups in 1987 while a lieutenant colonel in the national army, also earning himself the nickname “Rambo”. He had to do what he had to do in 1987, he told a Fiji newspaper in a 2014 interview.
Rabuka as military officer and the PM
Rabuka retired from Fiji military and joined politics taking his no-nonsense style of command from the parade ground to parliament. Then he was elected premier of the country 30 years ago in 1992 and held power until the 1999 polls when he lost to the Fiji’s first Indo-Fijian premier, Mahendra Chaudhry.
Rabuka, a devout Christian, married in 1975 but there were allegations that he has had affairs. A biography published in 2000 carried the allegations in this regard. “I have admitted I’m no angel… I have been weak in those areas,” he told a New Zealand publication at the time. Following a nine-month legal battle, Sitiveni “Rambo” Rabuka admitted in a court 20 years ago in 2002, that he had fathered a child with a journalist during an affair. — AFP/APP
