Suva City Council

The Suva City Council is the municipal law-making body of the city of Suva, Fiji's capital. It consists of 20 Councillors, elected for three-year terms from four multi-member constituencies called wards. Councillors, who are elected by residents, landowners, and representatives of corporations owning or occupying ratable property in Suva, elect a Lord Mayor and Deputy Lord Mayor from among their own members; they serve one-year terms and are eligible for reelection. Since the dismissal of the councillors by the interim military government the City Council is run by a Special Administrator appointed by the Ministry of Local Government.

Suva has had a somewhat turbulent electoral history. In the 1985 municipal election, the newly founded Labour Party won 8 of the 20 seats on the City Council to become the largest single party, and succeeded in electing Bob Kumar as Lord Mayor in a harbinger of the national election two years later, when an FLP-led coalition ousted the long-time Alliance Party government. The FLP later fell on hard times in the capital, however, and won no seats on the City Council in the municipal election of 1999. At the next municipal elections held in 2002, the Labour Party made significant gains, winning the five seats in the Samabula Ward. The coalition of then-Lord Mayor Chandu Umaria remained intact, however, with Umaria's Ratepayers Alliance (dominated by the National Federation Party) winning 8 seats and its ally, the SDL (the ruling party at the national level), 7. Under a memorandum of understanding, the two parties agreed to hold the Mayoralty for one year each. In 2004, the coalition collapsed, with the 5 FLP councilors teaming up with the SDL to reelect Ratu Peni Volavola, who had replaced Umaria as Lord Mayor the previous year.

Disagreements over the 2002 memorandum of understanding between the SDL and the NFP thwarted attempts to forge an electoral coalition between them for the 2005 municipal elections. The NFP charged that in making a common cause with the FLP in 2004, the SDL breached the agreement, which it said specified that in the third year, the Lord Mayor should be chosen jointly by the two parties. The SDL denied this, general secretary Jale Baba saying that there was no such stipulation in the agreement.

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