Baba was a founding member of the Fiji Labour Party in the mid-1980s and was elected in 1987 to the House of Representatives as a candidate of the Labour-National Federation Party Coalition, which brought Timoci Bavadra to power.
Baba launched the NLUP in June 2001 after resigning from the Fiji Labour Party (FLP) of former Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry, who had been deposed in the Fiji coup of 2000.