MACRON, LEADERSHIP RENAISSANCE AND NIGERIAN YOUTH (1)

The election of Emmanuel Macron as President of France holds lessons for Nigeria, writes Emmanuel Ojeifo

When the world talks about successful people, the conventional story line is always the same: our hero or celebrity is born in modest circumstances and by virtue of his own grit and talent, and a combination of pluck and initiative, fights his way to greatness. It is often the image of a person who rises to the top from nothing, save for his own individual effort. In his book, Outliers, the renowned American writer, Malcolm Gladwell radically alters this widespread perception of success. He argues that, “these kinds of personal explanations of success don’t work. People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.” For Gladwell, where and when we are born, the town we grow up in, who our friends and families are, the schools we attend, the culture we belong to and the legacies passed down to us by our forebears are all instrumental to understanding the ecology of success and achievement.

This may well be the story of the accession of Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron, the 39-year-old former civil servant and investment banker who was recently elected as President of France. Macron’s election has reinforced the conviction of many people in the potential and possibilities of youth. But it has also provided another good opportunity for Nigerian youth to reaffirm their irrepressible belief in the prospects of youth leadership, in a nation that is suspicious of the preparedness of young people for politics and public service. To be sure, Macron did not fall from the sky. He is a typical portrait of the sort of remarkable people that Gladwell calls “outliers,” that is, men and women who do things that are out of the ordinary. Macron’s electoral victory is the result of careful planning and deliberate preparation for many years, since his adolescence. This fact needs to be restated very clearly in a society like ours where many young people disparage hard work, discipline, commitment and are resentful of the words ‘sacrifice’ and ‘deferred gratification.’ Delayed gratification, according to the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, “is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with. It is the only decent way to live.” Sadly, the desire to make it by all means – fair and foul – has robbed many young people of this virtue of deferred gratification. Many young people today find themselves unwittingly choosing a shorter period of pleasure followed by a longer period of pain in preference to a shorter period of pain followed by a longer period of pleasure. No thanks to today’s version of religion, many young people are made to believe that they can make it quickly in life and rise on the ladder of success and prosperity by believing in the “God of miracle” without work. This is not how Macron reached the height of his life’s accomplishments. He nurtured the values of hard work and discipline, with a combination of grit, pluck and initiative. Nigerian youth who want to be like him have at least four lessons to learn from this youngest president in the history of the French republic. These lessons are: faith, hard work, education, and mentoring. Faith: Macron was born into a non-religious, well-educated middleclass family of doctors but was baptised a Roman Catholic at his own request when he was 12. This deliberate decision of faith at such a tender age is not something to gloss over. The young Macron knew that a commitment to know God, love God and serve God is a crucial catalyst for meaningful and purposeful success in life. This remarkable decision of faith was also responsible for his choice of the Jesuit-run high school in Amiens for his secondary education.

Hard work: From his early years, Macron was said to be smart and determined and performed well both in his studies and public career. He applied himself to all his tasks with diligence, vision, and a sense of purpose. In 2004, he started work as an Inspector of Finances in the Inspectorate General of Finances and then became an investment banker. He had to pay Euro 50,000 to buy himself out of his government contract in 2008 to pursue his highly paid position at Rothschild & Cie Banque. He demonstrated a capacity for quick learning, and rose through the ranks to become managing director, earning renown for his role in advising Nestlé’s $12 billion acquisition of a division of Pfizer in 2012.

Education: Macron attended a series of elite schools, but he distinguished himself with his intellect at an early age. He was a young person of brilliant and exceptional qualities, displaying an aptitude for literature, politics and theatre. After attending the local Jesuit school La Providence in Amiens and the prestigious Lycée Henri IV College in Paris, he went on to study philosophy at the Nanterre University, and obtained a Master’s degree in public affairs from the Paris Institute of Political Science. His interest in civil service made him train at the École Nationale D’administration and graduated in 2004. He achieved all these educational prodigies at the age of 27, and set out to pursue a clearly defined career path in politics and public service. One could see that his academic choices were well tailored to prepare him for his future public career. He also made deliberate effort to gather wide educational experience. In 1999 he worked as an editorial assistant to Paul Ricoeur, a prominent French philosopher who was then writing his last major work.

MACRON’S ELECTION HAS REINFORCED THE CONVICTION OF MANY PEOPLE IN THE POTENTIAL AND POSSIBILITIES OF YOUTH