Aging & Wisdom Quote by Félix Houphouët-Boigny

Power doesn’t usually advertise its limits, but Houphouet-Boigny does it here with quiet force: you can’t police a population into staying put. The line rejects the reflex of many postcolonial states - restricting mobility, rationing permits, treating cities like gated prizes - and reframes rural flight as a verdict on unequal living conditions, not a moral failure of the migrants.

The intent is practical and political. Rural exodus is cast as a symptom, not the disease. Instead of border-style controls inside a country, he argues for redistribution: make the countryside livable enough that leaving becomes a choice rather than an escape. That’s why the list matters. It’s not only “jobs” or “infrastructure” but dignity, culture, and even “the joy of living”. He’s defining development as lived experience, not just output metrics. The subtext is a rebuke of technocrats who promise modernization while tolerating rural humiliation and neglect. If the state treats rural citizens as second-class, the city becomes less a destination than a refuge.

The context sharpens the stakes. In mid-to-late 20th-century West Africa, capital cities swelled under the gravitational pull of administration, industry, and prestige. Leaders faced crowded slums, political volatility, and a fear that the countryside - often the regime’s base - would hollow out. Houphouet-Boigny answers with a legitimacy bargain: governance earns compliance by delivering equitable well-being. It’s also rhetorical jiu-jitsu: he turns a “security” problem into a rights-and-services agenda, insisting that the humane solution is also the only one that works.