Leadership Quote by Kay Rala Xanana Gusmao

Gusmao is making a wager on dignity as social glue: give people stable work, and solidarity stops being a slogan and becomes a reflex. The line is politically canny because it flips the usual order of operations. Instead of asking citizens to be altruistic first and prosperous later, he treats economic security as the precondition for civic virtue. Occupation here isn’t just a job; it’s belonging, routine, and the quiet confidence of being able to feed your kids without humiliation. From that base, he argues, the “social dimension” of human nature reasserts itself.

The subtext is a gentle rebuke to both elites and outsiders who moralize poverty. If people aren’t organizing, helping, or “showing community spirit,” maybe the issue isn’t defective character but defective conditions. Gusmao’s phrasing also makes a strategic promise: development won’t merely raise incomes; it will manufacture citizenship. That’s an invitation to buy into nation-building not as abstract patriotism but as an everyday ethic that emerges once survival isn’t the main occupation.

Context matters: as a leader shaped by anti-colonial struggle and the hard realities of state-building, he’s speaking to a post-conflict society where institutions are fragile and inequality can metastasize into resentment. The sentence is optimistic, but not naive. It’s a policy argument disguised as humanism: invest in livelihoods, and you get social cohesion as a dividend. The “instinctively” is doing a lot of work, portraying solidarity not as a luxury of the enlightened, but as a default setting unlocked by security.