Working translation. This page is an English translation of the French page at meriquite.com/dette-et-naissance/. It has not been adopted in English. In the event of any divergence of meaning, the French text prevails. The only English text adopted by the Conférence Nationale d'Expression Citoyenne is the founding doctrinal text, at Debt and Merit.
One does not repay one’s birth
“None is born free of debt” does not mean: every child comes into the world carrying an invoice. It means: no one who has become capable of acting may claim to owe nothing to the common conditions that made them capable of acting.
A reply to an objection concerning the meaning of the mériquitaire debt
From Monrovia, a business leader puts a fundamental objection to Moussa Touré: a debt normally presupposes a creditor, a debtor and a voluntary undertaking—how, then, could a child who has asked for nothing be born a debtor? Guillaume Kigbafori Soro replies by distinguishing civil debt, which is contractual and repayable, from the mériquitaire debt, which requires neither creditor nor prior consent but binds each person to the common conditions—language, school, peace, institutions—that made their own freedom possible.
- I. The objection received
- II. The reply of Guillaume Kigbafori Soro
- 1. A debt that is not contractual
- 2. What debt, then, is meant?
- 3. Can one owe without having consented?
- 4. A debt without a creditor
- 5. To receive is to judge
- 6. A clarification concerning merit
- 7. A debt that authorises no arbitrary power
I. The objection received
LETTER RECEIVED
I have followed with great interest the presentation of the new current of political and economic thought carried forward by GPS around President Guillaume Soro. I must say that this determination to bring fresh ideological reflection to political action deserves to be commended.
I have noted in particular two powerful concepts: the idea that “no one is born free of debt”, and that of meritocracy, presented as one of the ideological foundations of this new movement of thought. Allow me, however, to raise a question concerning the notion of a debt that each generation is said to have to assume before handing it on to the next generation.
To my knowledge, a debt normally presupposes a procedure and a voluntary act. It ought not, therefore, to be possible to impose a debt upon someone who has not taken part, in one way or another, in the act that created that obligation.
Take the example of a child coming into the world. At birth, that child is entirely innocent. The child did not ask to be born. Two adults met, loved one another, married or not, and their relationship led to the child’s birth. The child therefore arrives in a world whose fundamental decisions were taken before them and without them. Can one truly hold, then, that this child is born already a debtor?
As I personally understand it, the child ought not to be regarded as the debtor of their own existence, since they have never contracted this “debt”. Rather, the child receives an inheritance: a family, a society, a history, infrastructure, values, but also, at times, problems and responsibilities.
There is, in my humble opinion, a fundamental difference between being born with a debt and being born with a responsibility. A debt presupposes a creditor and an undertaking. A responsibility may arise from a collective inheritance and from a citizen’s conscience.
I should therefore be very glad to understand more fully the deeper thinking of GPS on this question: when you say that “no one is born free of debt”, what debt exactly is being spoken of? And above all, how can a person be regarded as the debtor of an obligation they have not themselves contracted?
II. The reply of Guillaume Kigbafori Soro
Dear Sir,
I thank you for the quality, the sincerity and the depth of your question. You do not stop at the word: you test its coherence. That is exactly how a political doctrine ought to be received. Not by automatic assent, but by examination.
1. A debt that is not contractual
Your objection is a serious one: if the debt of which we speak were a contractual debt, your reasoning would be beyond dispute. A civil or financial debt normally presupposes a creditor, a debtor, a determinate object and either a voluntary undertaking or a fact to which the law attaches an obligation. Yet the child asked neither to be born, nor to receive life, nor to enter a society already constituted. The child has signed no contract with their parents, with their ancestors or with the Nation.
I therefore answer you plainly: Mériquité (the doctrine of debt and merit) does not regard the child as the debtor of the price of their own existence.
Nor does it claim that parents grant life on credit and may later demand repayment. On the contrary, parents have a moral and legal obligation to protect the child they have brought into the world. At birth, the child is first and foremost the holder of a dignity and the beneficiary of an unconditional solidarity. The child is born neither guilty, nor owing a sum, nor subject to any parental claim.
The mériquitaire debt is therefore neither financial, nor contractual, nor a matter of accounting. Nor is it an original fault, a tax owed to society, or an obligation legally enforceable against the newborn.
2. What debt, then, is meant?
It denotes the moral, political and intergenerational obligation attached to certain common goods that we receive without having produced them and that remain necessary to the freedom of others and of future generations.
Before being able to choose, each person receives the very conditions that will one day enable them to choose: a language they did not invent, care they did not administer to themselves, knowledge they did not discover, a school they did not build, institutions they did not found, sometimes a peace they did not win and land shaped by the dead whom they never knew. Even those who succeed by their own work alone are travelling along a road they did not entirely build.
Mériquité does not, therefore, deny the autonomy of the individual. It recalls that this autonomy was itself made possible by prior relationships, institutions and inheritances.
3. Can one owe without having consented?
You then raise a decisive philosophical difficulty: can an obligation arise from the mere fact of having received something one did not ask for?
Mériquité’s answer is a qualified one. No, not everything received mechanically creates a debt. A gift imposed upon someone does not, by its mere existence, suffice to bind the person who receives it. Our theory does not conceal this difficulty and does not claim to derive a duty automatically from a bare fact.
It explicitly assumes a moral and political choice: no one may appropriate absolutely the common goods that have helped to form their own capacity to act, where those goods remain necessary to the capacity of others to act.
In other words, I may legitimately enjoy the language, the school, the peace, the institutions, the resources and the knowledge I have received. But I cannot maintain that, because I did not ask to receive them, I am free to destroy them, to monopolise them or to hand them on in a degraded state to those who come after me.
To require prior consent for every moral obligation would, moreover, lead to a dead end: our very capacity to consent did not exist at birth.
It was formed by the language, the education, the care, the human relationships and the institutions we received. We cannot, therefore, ask consent to be the sole foundation of everything that made consent possible.
4. A debt without a creditor
It is here that the word “debt” conveys something that the word “responsibility”, on its own, does not fully express. Responsibility might be understood as a decision each person takes freely, according to their conscience. Debt expresses an anteriority: before producing, we received; before being authors, we were beneficiaries. It means that handing on is not an optional generosity towards the future, but a requirement of justice.
This debt has, however, no individual creditor coming to claim what is owed. Parents cannot collect it. The dead cannot receive payment of it. Society cannot arbitrarily convert it into a levy. We do not give a language back to those who handed it down; we do not repay a school to those who built it; we do not return to the dead the peace they won.
That is why our formulation is precise: the debt cannot be paid off and it never expires; it is handed down, improved.
It is turned less towards repaying the past than towards protecting the future. We honour those who came before us not by giving back to them what they gave us, but by preventing those who come after us from receiving less than we did. And this burden is progressive: whoever has received more wealth, knowledge, power or advantage bears a heavier responsibility than someone who has been abandoned or deprived of the elementary conditions of autonomy.
5. To receive is to judge
Nor does receiving mean obeying the past. We inherit roads, knowledge and bonds of solidarity, but also injustices, prejudices and failing institutions.
To receive is to judge: to preserve what is just, to correct what is inadequate and to abolish what is unjust or wrong.
Mériquité thus protects the freedom of each generation. It does not require that generation to repeat the inheritance; it forbids it only to deprive the generations that follow of the conditions that will allow them, in their turn, to choose their own path.
6. A clarification concerning merit
I should also like to offer a clarification concerning the second concept you mention. Our doctrine does not rest upon “meritocracy” understood as a system in which the highest performers would be entitled to everything and the most vulnerable would deserve nothing. It rests upon the protection of merit.
The individual owes something to the community; but the community owes the individual this in return: that their effort shall not be stolen by corruption, nepotism, money, origin or connections. Merit is no favour bestowed by those in power; it is a right they must defend. Dignity, fundamental rights, essential care, justice, security and protection against abandonment nevertheless remain due to every person, including the person who can never give anything in return.
Here is the central reciprocity of Mériquité: the debt prevents merit from becoming the justification of privilege; merit prevents the debt from becoming the negation of effort.
7. A debt that authorises no arbitrary power
Finally, no public authority may invoke this moral debt in order to impose a burden upon citizens arbitrarily. Any legal obligation claiming to draw upon it must be provided for by law, accessible, foreseeable, proportionate and open to judicial review. The doctrine illuminates the law; it replaces neither the Constitution, nor fundamental rights, nor democratic consent.
Your own formulation is therefore very close to our thinking when you speak of a duty to preserve and improve what we have received in order to hand on a better world. Where Mériquité goes a little further is in affirming that this duty is not a mere display of generosity. It follows from our condition as relational beings and as temporary trustees of a common inheritance.
Thus “None is born free of debt” does not mean: every child comes into the world carrying an invoice. It means: no one who has become capable of acting may claim to owe nothing to the common conditions that made them capable of acting.
In a single sentence: we are not required to repay our birth; we are required to prevent our passage on earth from reducing the possibilities of those who will be born after us.
I thank you for giving Mériquité the opportunity to clarify one of its most demanding foundations. A doctrine that refuses objections grows weaker. A doctrine that faces them honestly learns to say better what it carries.
SORO KIGBAFORI Guillaume
President of Générations et Peuples Solidaires