For the first year and a half following the coup, the regime had sought to cultivate popular support for its various initiatives, such as the review of the Great Council of Chiefs (GCC), and the NCBBF. In the end, a Presidential decree made changes to the GCC that were so unpalatable to Fijians that even members of the review team resigned. The island of Kadavu dropped Josefa Nawalowalo as provincial chairman after he associated himself with the regime’s decree to reconfigure the GCC. Support for the NCBBF amongst indigenous Fijians was, at best, patchy. In Rotuma, Macuata and Serua, provincial chiefs indicated a willingness to embrace the new reform agenda. Qarase supporters were locked out of a meeting of the Lau provincial council meeting in June 2008 in a mini-coup that saw Ratu Mara’s son and military officer, Ratu Tevita Uluilakeba, assume the chairmanship. Lau’s faded glory since the death of Ratu Mara in 2004, it was hoped, would be resurrected through the new military-dominated political order. Most of the core Fijian provincial councils –including Naitasiri, Tailevu, Cakaudrove, Rewa, and Namosi – remained steadfastly opposed to the interim regime’s initiatives. Critically, no high profile splits amongst the SDL leadership had occurred that might give the commander a much-needed political niche. One ambitious SDL minister, Jonetani Navakamocea, had joined the January 2007 interim cabinet, but he was dropped in a January 2008 reshuffle and subsequently protested that an inner circle kitchen cabinet was running the affairs of state.^[124]

By mid-2008, Bainimarama had destroyed the careers of the bulk of the ethnic Fijian elite, by purges ranging from the public sector to the boards of state-owned companies and even to listed companies like Fijian Holdings Ltd. Had Fijian society been primarily class-based, this might have translated into grass roots support for the military regime. But it was not. Most Fijian families were hit hard by the removal of breadwinners from positions of influence. Some also benefited, and many had amongst their relatives both beneficiaries and those who had been deposed. The severity of the economic downturn ensured that what gains there were did not offset the losses.

Amongst the civil society activists, there were enthusiasts and visionaries who felt they were in the throes of a social and even spiritual revolution. They did not want an early election that might halt their transformational project, a point regularly negatively expressed by saying, as the Catholic Archbishop did, that elections ‘would not halt Fiji’s coup culture’. Perhaps not, replied lawyer Richard Naidu, ridiculing the idea that a military-sponsored initiative like the NCBBF might serve this purpose. Elections were a means to an end, said Naidu, not a panacea for all Fiji’s difficulties. The key and fairly obvious point was that only a constitutional government could find long-term solutions to Fiji’s ‘coup culture’.^[125] Naidu, like many of the public opponents of the coup, had been harassed at the Queen Elizabeth Barracks after the coup, when soldiers fired off a gun next to his hooded head, before releasing their traumatized captive. He, like many others, lowered his profile, and adopted a more cautious public stance. Despite all this harassment, when supporters and opponents of the ‘People’s Charter’ came together in a public debate in Suva’s JJs on the Park banquet hall, it was clear that the intellectual heavyweights – including Richard Naidu, Wadan Narsey and Tupou Draunidalo – were on the opposing side.^[126] That the middle ground had shifted away from a strained participation in the NCBBF initiative (on the grounds of the need for dialogue) was indicated by the resignations of Daryl Tarte, Mick Beddoes and Suliana Siwatibau in early 2008. Even amongst the Indian community, whose leader was in cabinet, the longer-term political ramifications of the coup were, by mid-2008, increasingly uncertain. As a Fiji Times editorial noted in April 2008 ‘there has been no groundswell of support for Commodore Bainimarama’.^[127]

Overseas pressure on Fiji’s interim government to hold elections was often justified in the context of broad-ranging principles of human rights or democratic norms. In response, Bainimarama’s ministers regularly upbraided foreign diplomats for a ‘dogmatic’ focus on the election timetable, and pleaded greater familiarity with Fiji’s historical circumstances.^[128] The weight of domestic hostility to the coup, silenced by civil rights abuses, ongoing intimidation and some growing sense of fatalism, was increasingly forgotten or conveniently ignored in this post-coup dialogue, even amongst those overseas commentators who were familiar with the once open style of pre-coup Fiji politics. But diplomatic pressure for an election or for a restoration of constitutional democracy only made good sense as a means for externally articulating the robust – if intimidated and sometimes silenced – Fiji-based resistance. Bainimarama’s decision to repudiate the March 2009 election date did not reflect some heartfelt commitment to the grand cause of electoral reform, but was rather a pragmatic acknowledgement of the unpropitious domestic balance of social forces.