Daily Inspiration Quote by Kamisese Mara

A denial this blunt is never just a personal boast; it is a political move aimed at the air around it. “I have never been bribed as a Prime Minister” is phrased like a courtroom answer, not a campaign slogan. Kamisese Mara isn’t claiming sainthood or even promising reform. He’s drawing a hard line around one specific charge: bribery. That specificity matters. It suggests the real battlefield is legitimacy, not policy - the right to be taken seriously in a political culture where patronage, gift-giving, and informal obligation can blur into corruption depending on who’s doing the defining.

As a statesman who dominated Fiji’s post-independence era, Mara’s authority rested on being both modern and traditional: an elite chief in a newly sovereign state, tasked with building institutions while navigating communal politics and business interests. In that context, “bribed” becomes a loaded word imported from a Western legal-moral framework, sharpened for an audience that might include journalists, political opponents, or international observers tracking governance in the Pacific. The subtext is defensive: if the question being asked is “Were you bought?” he answers it in a way that tries to close the case without inviting cross-examination.

The phrasing also reveals how corruption allegations work culturally: leaders often don’t need to be proved guilty to be weakened; they just need to be plausibly entangled. Mara’s sentence is an attempt to re-center the story on character, to reclaim the moral high ground with a simple, testable claim. It’s not a speech. It’s a shield.