Frank Bainimarama
Frank Bainimarama was prime minister of Fiji from 2007 to 2022, fifteen years, the navy commodore who had put down the coup of 2000, in which a businessman's gunmen held the Indo-Fijian prime minister Chaudhry and his cabinet hostage in the parliament for fifty-six days. He then made his own coup on 5 December 2006 against the government he had installed, saying it was corrupt and was pardoning the coup-makers, which was true. He ruled by decree for eight years, abrogated the constitution in 2009 when the court of appeal ruled his government illegal. He expelled the Australian and New Zealand high commissioners, censored the press with soldiers in the newsrooms, and was suspended from the Commonwealth and the Pacific Islands Forum. He wrote a constitution in 2013 that abolished the communal seats and the chiefs' council and made every citizen a Fijian, which the indigenous nationalists whose coups he had ended called an erasure and the Indo-Fijians called the first equal citizenship they had had. The election of 2014 under it gave his FijiFirst party fifty-nine per cent, and that of 2018 fifty. The country grew on tourism and sugar and remittances until Cyclone Winston of 2016 took a third of a year's output and the pandemic closed the resorts. He was born in Kiuva near Suva in 1954, joined the navy in 1975, trained in Chile and Australia, and commanded it from 1988. He became commander of the whole military in 1999, the post from which he faced the gunmen in 2000 and a mutiny of his own soldiers that November in which he escaped through a cassava field. He chaired the Pacific Islands Forum in 2019 and made climate change the region's cause at the UN, presided over the climate conference in Bonn in 2017, the first small island state to do so, and cultivated China and India alike after the West's sanctions. The election of December 2022 gave FijiFirst twenty-six seats of fifty-five and Rabuka, the coup-maker of 1987, a coalition of the rest, and he handed over on Christmas Eve. In 2023 he was suspended from parliament for a speech attacking the president, resigned his seat. In May 2024 he was sentenced to a year in prison for having ordered the police to drop an investigation into the University of the South Pacific in 2019, serving until October. FijiFirst dissolved itself in 2024 over its members' pay rise, and its founder was left with the constitution as his monument.
- Lived: 1954 CE – ?
- Nationality: Fijian
- Roles: prime minister, admiral, politician
