Mr. Philippe Forget's keynote address 30 April 2010

Mr P Forget delivering his keynote address

Mr P Forget delivering his keynote address

Ladies and gentlemen,

Young men and young women of the Charles Telfair graduating class of 2009,

You will all be beaming internally tonight. Why not? The road has been long. The road has been arduous. Tonight you are graduating and you deserve a bit of a break. A few hours of celebration. But a few hours only! For this is not the end of the road, surely not the time when you can switch off and put your thumbs under your arm pits and glory in your achievements!

For a successful life entails far more than just tonight and this is what I would wish to refer you to, in the hope of pointing to a few pathways of interest and a number of avenues leading to an exciting, fuller life.

Life, you see, is short and there is but one for each of us. Sounds simple enough but that should suggest to you that you should not amble along through it, cruising and, as most of humankind unfortunately, be on the side of lesser effort and maximum enjoyment. If you think this through you will realize that everything really worthwhile in life requires some extra effort. Unless you happen to be daddy's boy with the golden spoon, of course. Getting a diploma is worthwhile. Fighting for a degree is even better, especially if you aim for the higher scores. In the jobs you will be seeking out, please realize that salary, office size, one's position in the hierarchy, i.e. what you take out of the job are far less important than what you put in: namely your dedication to the task, your creativity and inventiveness and hence the job satisfaction derived; your integrity, your ethics and your self respect. In any case, with a worthwhile employer, what you take out of a job is in direct correlation to and naturally follows what you put in. I say those things to you knowing full well that they do not always apply with all employers. That is why the brightest and the best amongst you should never be content with a system or an employer that does not reward merit. When merit is denied, an injustice is done and that is worth fighting against. If your fight leads nowhere, change employer fast. You know why? Because all a system or an employer that favors protecting and rewarding sycophants, and boot lickers ends up doing, is to become dysfunctional and fragile and that is a recipe for eventual disaster. Sticking with this system will then put YOU at risk. So instead of doing what may sound smart, i.e. adapting to the game and doing like others, the really bright move is first to fight and, if unsuccessful, then to walk out and seek more credible pastures to operate in. It may not always be immediately easy, but it certainly is the safer, more rewarding attitude to have in the long term. My advice to you is to seek an environment that recognizes and rewards merit and effort and to sanction environments, leaders, employers that do not or else you will be walking on eggs all through your life and risk falling through when the wafer thin shells of "pretence" give way.

The main reason why what I am saying makes sense is that it fits with the core purpose of life itself which is to seize your moments , to grab your opportunities, to take, but , simultaneously to give back , to share out. A life spent taking and not giving back is unfruitful, narrow, non value adding.

As you set your bearings into this life, I will also point out four more dangers lying therein:

The first danger must be about the overbearing dominance of the unchecked capitalist model. Do not read me wrong: the liberal model has done a lot of good. It still does. But it is going down a dead end and the sooner we realize this, the better. The recent financial crisis illustrates what we are toying with: the market model is led by one concept: the absolute necessity of growth and it is too often fuelled by another: greed. In the mindless search for growth and money, what economic theory calls "rational economic man" unfortunately goes more than slightly potty, sometimes. The last decade has been incredibly spectacular illustrating this but, surprisingly, it is not all that new: From Xerox's false accounting to Enron's market rigging and debts disappearing in puffs of Special Purpose Vehicles , from Madoff's Ponzi scheme to Lehman's leveraged follies, from Parmalat's lies to the fictitious assets of Satyam Computers, they all have their predecessors in history and were all driven by the greed stoked up and nourished by delirious bonuses and the short-termism of the stock exchange. What is different now though is the sheer scale of the disasters they can generate as they can suck in most countries into one gigantic vortex of crisis. The internet, the instant echo provided by the media, the super computers, the very smart financial software that react to events in sync, thus causing more trouble than the initial twitch, the globally interconnected economies mean that bubbles are now larger and burst with far more of a "bang". I have no answers but we had better beware!

The second matter I will refer to is about taking too many things for granted. You are the Facebook and the iPod generation. So, you will possibly treat the airplane like a bus. I am still amazed that 250 tons of metal, with my excess luggage can actually fly! To most of you, air con, pre-packed food, micro surgery, the internet and satellite television are "givens". You might feel, in David Cameron's quote of Titanic fame, like you are the queens and kings of this world! But take a step back and it will do you good to put things in perspective, to be dazzled by the ingenuity of humankind, to pay homage to the people who came up with those fabulous goodies for our pleasure, our comfort, and our longer lives. By so taking this humble step back, you will realize, I hope, what a value adding life actually means and possibly end up adding value yourself. This is how humanity has moved forward so far. I could not wish something better than for you to have the appetite to learn more about how we got here, in order for you to picture what may best constitute an improved way of moving forward.

The next matter that needs to be brought to your attention concerns one of the most revolutionary and exciting pieces of research of the last two decades. It concerns the field of genetic mapping as a means of piecing together the migrations of homo sapiens, the thinking ape, who emerged in Africa some 200,000 years ago and has involved super pioneering work, namely by professor Luigi Cavalli Sforza. What emerges from this work is that it is now quite clear that ALL the people of the world outside Africa are the descendants of an estimated 80 homo sapiens specimens who emerged out of Africa some 60,000 years ago .yes, just 80!. What this means to us in 2010? Very simple really: it just means that however elaborate the apparent differences between our various cultures, belief systems, mannerisms, food choices, skins, facial features as we evolved them under different climates and in separate, isolated valleys , we are, at the end of the day, all cousins ! We are but one people. Homo, apparently, sapiens. Never forget this.

The last message pulls it all together and relates to mother Earth, or Gaia in the felicitous word chosen by James Lovelock. The Earth that everybody has plundered, exploited, tamed, ransacked, mined, tapped for its fuel and minerals, its wood and its fish, its oxygen and its grazing, is in trouble . The QUOTE "tightly coupled system behaving as a single, self regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components" UNQUOTE is being knocked off balance and will heat up under the greenhouse effect . Like the vast majority of scientists, I believe that it is the doing of man, which is the most successful living species on earth, for sure, but is also dangerously and wastefully hooked on an energy system dependant on polluting hydrocarbons. You see, the issue is simple enough to understand. For hundreds of millions of years, first the green algae that invented photosynthesis in the seas, then the higher forms of plant life that migrated to land, have been pulling Carbon Dioxide out of the atmosphere and fixing it in plant life. When this plant life died, over ages, over eons, it has sunk underground and been transformed into our coal, our gas, our petrol. Plants thus reduced the percentage of Carbon Dioxide in air from a noxious 15% to today's 0,03% . Those same plants released, as a bye product of photosynthesis, the oxygen that animal life, of which we have had need of to evolve. However, in just 250 years, that is, since the industrial revolution started in Britain, we have been aggressively inverting the pattern; burning the gas, the coal and the petrol that stored carbon away and releasing it in ever growing quantities in the atmosphere. This exercise was not wanton or gratuitous: it lifted our standards of living, allowed the magic of electricity, of cars and planes, of running hot water and better hygiene and that is fine. But it has also created a grave danger of which your generation needs to be aware of, if it is to face it off and cushion it: First, the industrial revolution has led to a population explosion, namely through greater production and distribution of food and far better health situations and standards. It is estimated that we are currently 6,8 billion people on earth. In just over 200 years we have almost multiplied world population by a factor of 7!!! We were just 1 billion in 1804. Moreover, matters are accelerating: we added the next billion of population, some 123 years later, i.e. by 1927. The latest billion of population, to 6 billion total, was achieved in 1999. It had taken just 12 years!!! 123 years for the second billion population, only 12 years for the 6th billion. At the rate of 80 million more humans per year the forecast is that we will be 10 billion people around by 2055. This is where it ties in with growth, for every single one of those 10 billion humans, from George Soros to a Chinese peasant in Sichuan, wants a higher standard of living and will get it through an unchecked capitalist system.

However, more people with higher standards of living means greater demand on finite resources like food, water, minerals, energy and, at the other end of the consuming cycle, more wastage produced , more pollution, which we already find difficult to manage as it is. The price explosions we faced in the boom times leading to the financial crisis (remember the barrel of petrol at 150$ in 2008?) will be coming back! On energy, on commodities, on food, on minerals we will be facing crisis if we do not change. Whether we hedge or not! Just watch! The gravest issue may be water since current demand for same doubles every twenty one years and desalination is nowhere near materially improving supplies.

I know that one of the endearing traits of humankind is its incredible inventiveness and creativity in solving problems, but on this one we may be facing our final station unless we radically change our way of doing things. And it has got to start now and start with everyone of us or it will simply not add up to enough, fast enough. This implies a solution to demographics, a less wasteful lifestyle, perhaps less meat, alternative energy sources, more responsible and forward looking political leadership and YOU doing something about it!

Let me try to summarize quickly:

  • What we get out of life is according to what we put in first
  • The capitalist system is anchored on growth by every individual, by every company , by every country and this will, at one point come to the end of resources which are finite
  • We generally take too many things for granted and fail to see and appreciate our responsibility and our role as an agent of change. Our usual local comment when there is a problem is "ILNYAKA". However, Mr. ILNYAKA will not get us out of this one
  • We are all cousins, in the same boat, a boat called planet earth, with the same challenges, however much politicians and the nation states would have it otherwise.

So in the final analysis the most integrated , delicately balanced, self regulated system in the world called Earth or more romantically Gaia, is (1st) reacting to what we are putting in (2nd) beginning to spin off into dangerous directions as our selfish growth-at-all-cost model is sucking resources too fast and polluting too heavily (3rd) can only be saved if we all put our minds to it, as one unique family and not take it for granted that someone else will come up with the solution.

My only hope for you guys is that your generation gets fired up, as all your cousins world wide, in order to get your leaders to see light fast, for as you know far too many of them do not exactly lead but actually follow what populations want and need . That is not surprising as this is clearly the more comfortable road for them: the one where we basically carry on as usual.

However, that more comfortable road is leading us to major trouble. Robert Frost's "road less travelled ", on the other hand, involves painful change and giving up on some pleasurable but poisonous practices. I wish you the elation of being part of the new wave of world citizens who will help save this planet. And do not get me wrong: this is not a doom and gloom message. This is a call to fight the greatest battle of all: that of YOUR successful LIFE!

Your life! And to do it with passion and to do it well! I thank you for your attention! Have a good, full life!

P Forget
Deputy Chief Executive Banking
Mauritius Commercial Bank

 

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