Politics & Power Quote by Omar Bongo

There is a diplomat's smirk tucked into Bongo's phrasing: "is supposed to be". He doesn't attack the free market head-on; he lets the promise indict itself. In one clause, he captures how an economic doctrine sells itself as moral destiny, not merely policy - the "only path" to "the happiness of humanity" - then quietly pivots to what that creed reliably measures: "wealth and prosperity, power and influence of nations". The sentence performs a bait-and-switch on purpose. It starts with human flourishing and ends with state muscle.

Context matters because Bongo spoke from the vantage point of postcolonial governance in a world where "free markets" often arrived bundled with conditional loans, structural adjustment, and a very selective definition of freedom. For many African states, the market wasn't a neutral arena; it was a set of rules written elsewhere, enforced through institutions that treated social spending as indulgence and export discipline as virtue. When Bongo lists "power and influence", he's pointing to the real scoreboard: nations gain leverage; citizens are asked to call that happiness.

The subtext is not anti-commerce so much as anti-mysticism. Bongo is skeptical of ideologies that claim inevitability, especially when they flatter the strong. By framing the market as a story we are told - "supposed to be" - he invites the listener to notice who benefits from the storytelling, and who gets blamed when prosperity fails to materialize.