FIJI’S coups triggered a wave of decrees that transformed Fiji’s public service.
They ripped through the machinery of the state, politicised public hiring, weakened oversight and left generations of civil servants working inside institutions reshaped to suit the regime of the day, governance expert Professor Graham Hassall told the Fiji Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Hassall said the public service emerged from the coups of 1987, 2000 and 2006 profoundly damaged, with constitutional orders revoked by decree, senior officials dismissed, appointment powers centralised and public money tightly controlled from the top.
The result, he said, was a public sector marked by instability, demoralisation and a long erosion of professional norms.
“My research was conducted firstly through my presence here from 2004 to 2009, a period of six years during that particular period, electronic materials that are available, government reports, and my interviews with senior people that were involved in different stages of this experience in Fiji,” Hassall told commissioners.
At the centre of his evidence was a stark claim: the coups were not isolated political interruptions, but legal and administrative breaks that changed the state itself.
“Firstly, those that revoke constitutions,” he said, identifying the decrees that followed each takeover as the most consequential.
“After the 1987 coup, the Fiji Constitution Revocation Decree removed the 1970 Constitution and replaced it with new legal authority.
“After the 2000 coup, constitutional change again followed by decree and in 2009, the presidential abrogation decree removed the existing constitutional order once more.”
Those measures, Hassall argued, did more than suspend democracy. They reset the rules of public administration.
“Sometimes they didn’t bring back all the instruments,” he said, pointing to the omission of institutions such as the ombudsman commission after later upheavals.
He singled out three employment-related decrees as especially damaging. One, issued in 2007, terminated the contracts of every chief executive in the public service.
“The contract of employment of every CEO in the public service is forthwith repudiated and terminated immediately and is not open to judicial review.”
He paused on the consequences of that decision.
“Sometimes it takes a moment to think of the breathtaking impact of such a decree on the country and on the lives of those CEOs involved,” he said
Another decree from 1987 required all department heads to be Indigenous Fijian and set ethnic thresholds for promotions. Hassall described it as a sweeping intervention that subordinated merit to identity.
“Merit was subordinate to ethnicity,” he said. “Notwithstanding the merit of a public servant, the important criteria for their employment was their ethnicity.”
A third measure, the 2009 State Services Decree, went even further, he said, centralising executive power, imposing a mandatory retirement age of 55, abolishing oversight bodies and dismissing 14 categories of public service leadership.
“The members of the Public Service Commission, the Constitutional Offices Commission, the Electoral Commission, the Supervisor of Elections, the Ombudsman, the Auditor General, Solicitor General, Director of Public Prosecutions, Commissioner of Police, Commander of the Military Forces, Commissioner of Prisons, and other positions were immediately disbanded,” he told the commission.
Those positions, he said, were then reopened for application under a new political order.
Governance, Control and Consequences
Hassall said the decrees did not merely alter who ran the state. They altered how the state worked.
He pointed to a 2007 appropriation and budget promulgation that cut the number of ministries and stripped financial authority away from government secretaries, forcing expenditure decisions up the chain of command.
“The expenditure decisions at all levels had to be put up through the CEO for approval,” he said, adding that the change constrained routine decision-making for years.
He said the 2009 State Services Decree also politicised appointments across the public sector, creating a system in which top-level appointments required the approval of the prime minister and many others needed ministerial approval.
“This relates to a highly politicised appointment at all levels, the highest level to the lowest,” he said.
Beyond the laws that were passed, Hassall said the more telling story may be what was left out.
Most decrees, he said, dealt with finance, tax, customs and state structure. Few, if any, addressed public goods such as health, education, agriculture, pensions, the environment, heritage, communications or power.
“There are no decrees on public goods, the advancement of public goods. The decrees are about the shape, the state, and the financing.”
That absence, he argued, mattered as much as the decrees themselves. It suggested that the coup-era state was designed to control power and preserve regime authority, not to expand services or strengthen institutions.
“There was no law reform, no legal innovation for the development of public goods in the country,” Hassall said.
The wider impact, he told commissioners, was a public service shaken at its foundations: reduced merit, greater political interference, weakened oversight and a legacy of instability that touched countless careers and households.
“It’s not just what is in the decrees; it’s what’s not in the decision-making during that period,” he said.
The evidence adds to a growing body of testimony that the coups’ effects in Fiji were not confined to the political arena.
They reached into the civil service, reworked the balance between law and power, and left a long institutional shadow that is still being reckoned with today.
