Wealth & Money Quote by Kamisese Mara

A little too candid to be polished, this is the sound of a statesman trying to make public money look like private virtue. Mara frames his income in the plainest bureaucratic terms - "money from the treasury" - then immediately pivots to a familiar moral arc: youthful indulgence ("go the clubs") giving way to adult responsibility ("the burden of looking after my children"). The intent is reputational as much as autobiographical. He is building a character defense in miniature: yes, there was leisure; no, it did not curdle into corruption.

What makes the line work is its careful choice of burdens. Not office, not nation, not history - children. It domesticates power, shrinking the distance between Fiji's political elite and the listener's everyday ledger. In societies where leaders are regularly suspected of skimming from the state, invoking family is a strategic shorthand for trustworthiness. Saving "as much as I could" signals restraint without promising sainthood; it implies limits, a realistic struggle against temptation, the kind of modesty voters often find more believable than moral perfection.

The context matters. Mara's career sits in the high-stakes transition from colony to independent state, when "the treasury" wasn't an abstract institution but the contested container of a new nation's legitimacy. By narrating his relationship to public funds as ordinary, disciplined, and family-driven, he is also asserting a model of governance: the state should be managed like a household budget, not a spoils system. The slightly awkward phrasing - "quite life" - only strengthens the effect, suggesting this isn't a slogan but a lived posture he wants history to record.