Wealth & Money Quote by Félix Houphouët-Boigny

A tidy moral syllogism, delivered with the authority of a state: if you want equality, you have to want prosperity first. Houphouet-Boigny frames redistribution as a trap when the base is poverty, insisting that the only shareable outcome worth pursuing is wealth. The phrasing is doing political work. “The Ivorian” isn’t just a citizen; it’s an idealized national subject, a disciplined participant in a development project. The sentence turns a collective desire (“sharing of wealth”) into a conditional obligation: to deserve the dividend, you must help produce it.

The subtext is a rebuke to zero-sum politics and a preemptive strike against class conflict. By contrasting “wealth” with “misery”, he makes certain demands sound like moral confusion: who would campaign to distribute suffering? That rhetorical move narrows the range of legitimate opposition. Labor agitation, radical redistribution, even anti-elite resentment can be cast as an attempt to “share misery” rather than build the pie.

Context matters: Houphouet-Boigny’s post-independence Ivory Coast sold itself on stability, export-led growth, and a paternalistic social bargain sometimes summarized as “peace through prosperity”. This line fits the era’s developmentalist credo and the Cold War pressure to present capitalism-with-African-characteristics as the responsible alternative to revolutionary socialism. It’s also a subtle discipline mechanism. By shifting emphasis to “contribute”, he places the burden on ordinary Ivorians to produce “riches”, while leaving unspoken who controls the terms of production, who captures the surplus, and how fairly “wealth” will be shared once it exists. The elegance is in the promise; the power is in the condition.