Leadership Quote by Félix Houphouët-Boigny

“A miracle” usually arrives with the alibi of mystery: no fingerprints, no planner, no human author. Houphouet-Boigny strips it of that innocence. By yoking miracle to “a bet”, he drags the sacred into the market square, into a world of stakes, calculation, and risk. The line is a deliberate act of political demystification: the extraordinary is not granted, it is engineered.

The syntax does the heavy lifting. The piled-up verbs - “prepared”, “conditioned”, “measured”, “decided”, “realized” - read like a project plan, not a prayer. Each step tightens the circle around chance. Even “conditioned” is telling: it suggests an environment can be shaped so outcomes become more likely. That’s the subtext of statecraft in a postcolonial moment: development isn’t a wish; it’s an apparatus, built deliberately, sustained relentlessly.

As a president, Houphouet-Boigny is also managing a psychology. New nations are routinely asked to perform optimism while being denied the tools to deliver it. So he offers a counter-myth calibrated for governance: miracles are the reward for “will and perseverance”, virtues that can be preached, demanded, and measured. It’s motivational, yes, but it’s also disciplinary. If success is willed into existence, failure can be framed as insufficient will - conveniently relocating responsibility from structures and geopolitics to citizens and leaders.

The line works because it sounds like hope while smuggling in control. It promises transcendence, then insists the path there runs through planning, endurance, and political resolve.