Vika Lusibaea
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The Right Honourable Vika Lusibaea MP |
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| Member of Parliament for North Malaita |
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Assumed office 1 August 2012 |
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| Preceded by | Jimmy Lusibaea |
| Majority | 33.4% |
| Personal details | |
| Political party | Independent |
Vika Koto Lusibaea (born 28 June 1964) is a Solomon Islands politician.
She was born in Fiji.
With no more than a primary school education, she ultimately went into business, attaining a managerial position in a private company.
Having married a Solomon Islander and established her home in the Solomons, she became a naturalised citizen of that country. Her husband is Jimmy "Rasta" Lusibaea, who was a warlord, one of the leaders of the Malaita Eagle Force, during severe ethnic conflicts in the Solomons in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. After serving time in prison, he went into politics, and was elected to the National Parliament as independent MP for the North Malaita constituency in the 2010 general election, then immediately appointed as Minister for Fisheries and Marine Resources in Prime Minister Danny Philip's government. In October 2011, he lost his seat in Parliament and his position in the Cabinet upon being convicted for grievous bodily harm and assaulting a police officer, for events dating back to the interethnic violence a decade earlier. His expulsion from Parliament led to a by-election for his seat, held on 1 August 2012.
Jimmy Lusibaea asked his reluctant wife to stand in the by-election, essentially to represent him in Parliament in his place. At that stage, there had only ever been one woman elected to Parliament in the country's entire history since its independence from the United Kingdom in 1978: Hilda Kari had been an MP from 1989 to 2001. Jimmy Lusibaea later told the magazine Repúblika that when he had proposed and endorsed his wife as a candidate, he had had to overcome strong prejudice in the constituency against the notion of a woman MP:
"Tobaita, the name of our region itself, means men are bigger or more important than women and this is the mentality of us Tobaitans. I told them three things: first, that the Westminster system of government is a foreign concept with a woman, Queen Elizabeth, at its head. It is not a cultural entity otherwise I would not be putting Vika forward as a candidate. Secondly, I told them we need Vika to be elected in order for our work and the programmes we started to continue, and finally I challenged them to make history by becoming the first constituency in Malaita province to elect a woman to parliament."
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