Daily Inspiration Quote by Kamisese Mara

Power, in this line, isn’t asserted with lofty nation-building rhetoric; it’s asserted with a scolding. Mara’s phrasing turns authority into etiquette: the problem isn’t policy disagreement but manners, a failure to “behave” correctly in the presence of the Commander in Chief. That insistence on protocol reveals a leader who understands legitimacy as something performed in public, upheld by gestures of deference as much as by law.

The sentence’s odd, looping construction does real work. “Not that I know that I am” shifts the burden away from his own self-conception and onto their recognition. He’s not begging to be seen as powerful; he’s insisting that the office already exists and that their conduct must align with it. It’s a classic statesman’s move: make the institution, not the ego, the centerpiece - while still demanding personal respect. The repetition of “know” reads like a warning that ignorance will not be treated as innocence.

Context matters because in many postcolonial political environments - Fiji included - authority sits at the uneasy intersection of inherited constitutional roles, military symbolism, and communal expectations. “Commander in Chief” is both legal title and cultural signal: it invokes command, discipline, and hierarchy, a vocabulary that can crowd out democratic friction. Subtext: disagreement is recoded as insolence; dissent becomes a breach of decorum. Mara is policing the boundary between criticism and disrespect, and in doing so, he reveals how fragile order can feel when leaders must constantly re-stage the legitimacy of the state through the choreography of obedience.