People that squander our money and abuse their offices should be held accountable – Narube

Unity Fiji Leader and former Reserve Bank of Fiji Governor, Savenaca Narube says he wishes that we hold the people that squander our money, abuse their offices and break laws to account because corruption destroys initiatives, the economy and confidence.

While speaking in a panel discussion during the National Economic Summit, Narube says he wishes we could make appointments on merit which is probably wishful thinking in a political world but he hopes they do not appoint just because of political affiliations.

He says we should swallow some medicine now before we find ourselves in the hospital bed sometime in the future.

When asked what can be done to address the issue of cost of living, Narube says the consumers bear all the burden of the increased cost of living and he asks that why don’t we share that burden with the businesses through price control mechanisms.

He further says the economy in his view will not get to where it was in 2019 until 2025 which is a long period of gestation and decline.

He says without COVID, Fiji’s average growth rate in the long term is about 2 percent which is not enough to get us where we want to go.

Narube says debt servicing is crowding out the essential expenses of the government and according to his calculation, 44 cents of every dollar that we get from domestic revenue goes to the payment of the debt.

He says Fiji should focus first on reforming expenses because we do not want to be spending hard earned revenue on expenses that are wasteful.

The Party leader says the government should remove wastage especially those that are systematically there in the budget. He further says State owned entities takes up a lot of our money and they should be reformed.

He says there is a long of potential and options to diversify the economy and the Fiji’s future depends on the development of natural resources.

Narube says natural resources are not integrated into the value chain.

He says he also wants to bring the disparity of wealth into this discussion which is very important to future economic and political stability.