Daily Inspiration Quote by Kamisese Mara

It is the simplest kind of political alibi: not ambition, not ideology, just an emergency. Kamisese Mara’s question turns leadership into reflex, the moral equivalent of grabbing a bucket when the flames start licking the rafters. The genius is in the domestic scale. “My house” collapses the distance between state and self, converting a nation’s crisis into something intimate, proprietary, and immediate. If the house is yours, standing aside isn’t neutrality; it’s negligence.

As a statesman from a newly independent Fiji, Mara understood how quickly the language of “stability” can harden into a rationale for extraordinary action. The metaphor does double work. Fire evokes chaos and contagion: once it spreads, it doesn’t respect party lines, ethnic boundaries, or constitutional niceties. That image can dignify intervention as duty, but it can also quietly preempt debate. If you’re arguing process while the house burns, you look frivolous or complicit. The question doesn’t invite disagreement; it dares you to accuse a homeowner of caring too much.

There’s subtextual ownership politics here, too. Calling it “my” house implies a steward’s claim that can shade into entitlement: the leader as patriarch, the public as family, dissent as squabbling while the roof collapses. In societies navigating coups, communal tension, or fragile institutions, that paternal register is seductive. Mara’s line is persuasive because it frames power not as a prize to be won, but as a responsibility you cannot morally refuse - and because it makes refusal sound like watching your own home turn to ash.