Politics & Power Quote by Mathieu Kerekou

Class solidarity, upgraded for the diplomatic age. Kerekou is doing a careful bit of rhetorical jiu-jitsu: he names poverty without letting it become humiliation, then reframes national pride as something you earn through posture and alignment rather than GDP. The line "poor among the poorest, or less poor among the wealthier" is deliberately unsentimental. It admits hierarchy even inside "the poor", puncturing any fantasy that deprivation is a single, flattening condition. By acknowledging gradations, he inoculates the audience against shame and against the corrosive comparison game that can fracture a fragile polity.

The real pivot is the demand to "stand proud and noteworthy, united and strong". This is not just pep talk; it's an instruction for how a small or economically pressured state should behave in an international system that routinely confuses wealth with legitimacy. "Noteworthy" is the tell: he isn't promising riches, he's promising visibility, dignity, and leverage. Unity becomes a geopolitical asset.

Then comes the strategic comfort: "belonging to the Community of the Free Nations of our Planet". That phrase borrows the moral glow of freedom as a club you can join, even if you can't buy your way in. Given Kerekou's own ideological trajectory in Benin, the appeal reads as both aspirational and corrective: a public commitment to the language of democratic belonging, aimed outward at partners and inward at citizens who have lived through reinvention. It's a bid to convert scarcity into credibility by anchoring national identity to a global, values-based fraternity.