Politics & Power Quote by Kamisese Mara

The power of Kamisese Mara's recollection is its almost casual compression of a constitutional rupture into a day’s schedule. He doesn’t dress the moment in melodrama; he timestamps it. “We started at 8,” then a phone call, then “there’s a coup.” The bluntness is the point: politics, for leaders inside the machine, often arrives not as thunder but as logistics. A government can fall between meetings.

That offhand rhythm also signals credibility. Mara’s phrasing reads like a man still orienting himself to shock by clinging to the concrete: hours, locations, the Parliament’s sitting. It’s less a set-piece speech than a field report, and that plainness doubles as indictment. In a functioning democracy, Parliament sitting should be the apex of legitimate power. Here it becomes an almost irrelevant detail, eclipsed by events already “done then.” The coup doesn’t interrupt procedure; it renders procedure performative.

The subtext is institutional fragility and elite proximity. Mara is not describing chaos in the streets; he’s describing how quickly the center of authority relocates, and how swiftly insiders are forced to recalibrate. The telephone matters: modern governance depends on networks, and those networks also transmit collapse at the speed of a call.

Contextually, as a Fijian statesman speaking from experience in a postcolonial democracy with contested authority, Mara’s clipped memory reads as both warning and lament. The clock keeps ticking even as legitimacy evaporates. That’s the bleak elegance of it.