"It is with obedience to your call that I take up the burden of government leadership for the final time"
About this Quote
There is a quiet theatrics in "obedience to your call": a statesman borrowing the language of duty to make power sound like sacrifice. Kamisese Mara frames his return not as ambition but as submission to a collective summons, shifting agency away from himself and onto "your" demand. It is a classic move in democratic rhetoric, but it lands with particular force in small-nation politics where legitimacy is often braided from personal stature, communal expectation, and fragile institutions. If leadership is contested, claiming you were called back by the people (or by history) is a way of preempting the obvious question: why are you still here?
"Burden" does double work. It flatters the public by implying governance is onerous and unglamorous, and it burnishes the speaker's moral profile: he is not seeking office, he is carrying it. That noun also hints at crisis. Leaders rarely describe routine administration as a burden; they reach for that register when stability feels at risk or when the office has become politically costly.
"For the final time" is the line's steel. It offers reassurance - no endless tenure, no permanent patriarch - while also demanding a kind of indulgence. If this is the last chapter, then criticism can be framed as disrespect for a closing act of service. In postcolonial contexts like Fiji's, where leadership can be inseparable from nation-building narratives, the promise of finality reads less like retirement and more like an attempt to choreograph succession, to exit on one's own terms, and to keep the story - and the state - from slipping out of one's hands.
"Burden" does double work. It flatters the public by implying governance is onerous and unglamorous, and it burnishes the speaker's moral profile: he is not seeking office, he is carrying it. That noun also hints at crisis. Leaders rarely describe routine administration as a burden; they reach for that register when stability feels at risk or when the office has become politically costly.
"For the final time" is the line's steel. It offers reassurance - no endless tenure, no permanent patriarch - while also demanding a kind of indulgence. If this is the last chapter, then criticism can be framed as disrespect for a closing act of service. In postcolonial contexts like Fiji's, where leadership can be inseparable from nation-building narratives, the promise of finality reads less like retirement and more like an attempt to choreograph succession, to exit on one's own terms, and to keep the story - and the state - from slipping out of one's hands.
Quote Details
| Topic | Servant Leadership |
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