Wyclef Jean to Run for President of Haiti

Time, By Tim Padgett / Port-au-Prince, Wednesday, Aug. 04, 2010


Hip-hop, more than most pop genres, is something of a pulpit, urban fire
and brimstone garbed in baggy pants and backward caps. So it's little wonder
that one of the music form's icons, Haitian-American superstar Wyclef Jean,
is the son of a Nazarene preacher ‹ or that he likens himself, as a child of
the Haitian diaspora, to a modern-day Moses, destined to return and lead his
people out of bondage. Haiti's Jan. 12 earthquake, which ravaged the western
hemisphere's poorest country and killed more than 200,000 people, was the
biblical event that sealed his calling. After days of helping ferry mangled
Haitian corpses to morgues, Jean felt as if he'd "finished the journey from
my basket in the bulrushes to standing in front of the burning bush," he
told me this week. "I knew I'd have to take the next step."

That would be running for President of Haiti. Jean told TIME he is going to
announce his candidacy for the Nov. 28 election just days before the Aug. 7
deadline. One plan that was discussed, loaded with as much Mosaic symbolism
as a news cycle can hold, called for him to declare his candidacy on Aug. 5
upon arriving in Port-au-Prince from New York City, where he grew up after
leaving Haiti with his family at age 9. "If not for the earthquake, I
probably would have waited another 10 years before doing this," Jean says.
"The quake drove home to me that Haiti can't wait another 10 years for us to
bring it into the 21st century." Jean sees no contradiction between his life
as an artist and his ambitions as a politician. "If I can't take five years
out to serve my country as President," he argues, "then everything I've been
singing about, like equal rights, doesn't mean anything."

It's tempting to dismiss this as flaky performance art, a publicity stunt
from the same guy who just a few years ago recorded a number called
"President" that included the refrain "If I was President." But Jean's
chances as well as his motives seem solid. And there are good reasons for
Haitians ‹ and the U.S.-led international donor community, which is
bankrolling Haiti's long slog to the 21st century ‹ to take this particular
hip-hop politician seriously. Pop-culture celebrity hardly disqualifies you
from high office today. (The last time I looked, an action hero was still
running California.) And in Haiti, where half the population of about 9
million is under age 25, it's an asset as golden as a rapper's chains. Amid
Haiti's gray postquake rubble, Jean is far more popular with that young
cohort than their chronically corrupt and inept mainstream politicians are,
and he'll likely galvanize youth participation in the election.

More important, Jean stands to prove that fame can do more than lift voter
turnout ‹ or raise millions of dollars for earthquake victims, as his Yéle
Haiti (Haiti Freedom Cry) foundation has this year. His presidential run,
win or lose, could build a long-awaited bridge between Haiti and its
diaspora: a legion of expatriates and their progeny, many of them successful
in pursuits spanning every field, who number 800,000 in the U.S. alone.
International aid managers agree that Haiti really can't recover from the
quake unless it taps into the education, capital, entrepreneurial drive and
love for mother country that Jean epitomizes ‹ even if his French (one of
Haiti's official languages) is poor and his Creole (the other) is rusty. "A
lot of Haitians are excited about this," says Marvel Dandin, a popular
Port-au-Prince radio broadcaster. "Given the awful situation in Haiti right
now," he says, "most people don't care if the President speaks fluent
Creole."

Accentuating the Positive
Jean's celebrity candidacy at least promises to keep an erratic media more
regularly focused on Haiti's awful situation. International donors have
pledged some $10 billion in aid, but seven months after the earthquake,
mountains of shattered concrete still choke Port-au-Prince's streets, and
more than a million people remain homeless, trapped in squalid tent cities
as a sclerotic government bureaucracy and loosely organized aid groups
struggle to relocate them to decent temporary shelters. The Caribbean
hurricane season, which reaches its peak in about a month, threatens to make
conditions even uglier.

Jean has spent most of his life trying to show the world the positive side
of star-crossed Haiti. Despite his Brooklyn and New Jersey upbringing ‹
where he recalls weekly "beat up a Haitian" days at his schools ‹ he proudly
embraced the nation, even when, in the 1980s and '90s, Haiti was an abject
byword for boat people, AIDS and dictators. "A lot of us focused on
assimilation in the U.S.," says Jean's younger brother Sam, a New York
entertainment lawyer. "Clef was unabashedly proud to be Haitian long before
it was in vogue." So much so that Jean never took U.S. citizenship, instead
carrying a Haitian passport on his international concert tours.

Jean brought Haiti and its culture into his Grammy-winning music too. As a
member of the groundbreaking hip-hop group the Fugees (short for refugees)
in the mid-'90s, and then as a solo act, Jean built compas, rasin and other
Haitian rhythms into hits like "Gone Till November." His work earned him a
reputation as Haiti's Bob Marley, helping foreigners unearth the vibrant
culture so often buried under the misery. Not that he left out the misery:
like Marley's songs, Jean's exude a raw but poetic social content. The video
for his 2007 hit "Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill)," which examines exploitation
both sexual and national, is set in a camp for refugees facing deportation.
Now he wants to move beyond music. Jean has gotten so involved with not just
the culture but the cause of Haiti that he feels it's only logical to follow
other artist-to-statesman career trajectories. (He mentions Ronald Reagan
and former Czech President Vaclav Havel as examples of the type.) Yéle Haiti
has secured scholarships and aid for thousands of destitute Haitian kids;
since the earthquake, the Yéle Corps has given Haitians jobs removing rubble
and housing the displaced. Jean sits through the kind of development
conferences in Washington and Europe that would bore most do-gooder celebs
to tears. "I want to be part of a different kind of celebrity," he says,
"one that thinks not just about charity but policy." He's been noticed; in
2007, Haitian President René Préval appointed Jean as an ambassador at
large.

Yet serious doubts persist that Jean is ready for a role beyond that of
goodwill envoy ‹ most of them focused on his controversial management of
Yéle Haiti. Shortly after the quake, when Jean had been all but canonized
for his Haiti work, skeptics pointed out that his foundation had been paying
hundreds of thousands of dollars to production companies owned by him or his
associates. Florida, where the charity has an office, has sanctioned it four
times in the past six years for disclosure violations, and watchdogs like
Charity Navigator have questioned it for filing tax returns that were
"beyond late." Jean has acknowledged the questionable payments but blamed
them on accounting errors. He insists the problems have been fixed since he
hired a reputable Washington accounting firm to whip Yéle Haiti's books into
shape. "I took responsibility," he says. "I took the bullet."

Not the Elite's Favorite Son
More shots may be fired at his claim of eligibility for the presidency. A
candidate is required to have resided in Haiti for five consecutive years.
Jean's advisers insist that the nine years he lived in the country after
birth satisfy that criterion. But Haiti's political and business elites ‹
who, after living through the populist ordeal of former Roman Catholic
priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide's two presidencies in the 1990s and 2000s,
aren't exactly thrilled about the prospects of a diaspora hip-hopper getting
elected ‹ are likely to grab any challenge they can throw at Jean.

That Haitian political class, it should be remembered, has its own epic
shortcomings, whether measured by incompetence or venality. (No other
Haitian politician has yet declared a run for the presidency, although
Jean's uncle Raymond Joseph, Haiti's ambassador to the U.S., is reportedly
mulling his own campaign.) Haiti's traditional elite class has shown an
utter failure ‹ and lack of will ‹ to reform a medieval land-ownership
system, something that is vital to getting the country's crucial
population-relocation project going. Most Haitians consider President Préval
to have been all but AWOL since the quake, and tales of bureaucratic
shakedowns to get foreign-donated relief equipment and supplies out of
customs are appallingly commonplace.

Against that backdrop, Haitian voters may well decide that Jean and his
reformist party, Ensemble Nous Faut (We Must Do It Together), could do no
worse than the old guard and could shake things up for the better. His
campaign slogan, "Face à Face" (Face to Face), he says, is a signal that
"the old school will have to fall in line with a new model. Haitian
government will finally be conducted out in the open."

Outside Haiti, Jean has little trouble finding support. Many diaspora
leaders are rooting for him. (He's married to a Haitian American, New York
fashion designer Marie Claudinette.) But given the long-held disdain the
island elite holds for expats, the diaspora's hope is tempered. "I think
Wyclef's candidacy is going to surprise a lot of people," says Florida state
representative Phillip Brutus, a Haitian American from Miami and a candidate
for the U.S. Congress. "But I fear that if you parachute him into the
Haitian presidency, the culture of corruption and cronyism there may well
eat him alive."

Jean insists he's not playing "the naive idealist." He gets much of his
platform, he says, "right out of the playbook" of former U.S. President Bill
Clinton, the U.N.'s special envoy to Haiti, whose pragmatic vision of
bringing business, government and civil society together for development
ventures was bearing fruit on the island before the earthquake hit. "I'm the
only man who can stand in the middle and get the diaspora and Haiti's elite
families to cooperate that same way," says Jean. (It's not a ridiculous
claim: If Ivory Coast soccer phenom Didier Drogba could bring his country's
warring factions together a few years ago, who's to say Jean can't use his
renown to succeed in Haiti?) Jean's priority ‹ one he shares with Haiti's
Prime Minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, who is one of Haiti's few respected pols
but is unlikely to run for President ‹ is to disperse both power and
population from overcrowded Port-au-Prince and revive Haiti's fallow
agricultural sector with new rural communities tied to schools, clinics and
businesses.

His secret weapon, Jean says, is that Haiti's "enormous youth population
doesn't believe in [its] politicians anymore." On one Port-au-Prince street
corner, an unemployed tough, Sydney Meristal, 23, says he will vote for the
first time in November because of Jean. "Wyclef loves Haiti. He has ideas
for Haiti," says Meristal, idling away the time on his motorcycle. "He'll
win." But Steve Burr-Renauld, 23, who hails from an affluent family in the
capital, doesn't think a hip-hop star has the credentials to run. "What if
[American rapper] Jay-Z became President of the U.S.?" he asks. "That would
never happen." If Jean were elected President of Haiti, Burr-Renauld warns,
it would be like another earthquake aftershock.

Jean admits that "it's a hard thing for people to take artists seriously"
in the political arena. In the chorus of "President" ‹ "I'd get elected on
Friday, assassinated on Saturday, buried on Sunday and back to work on
Monday" ‹ Jean makes you wonder if he takes politics all that seriously
himself. But the verses remind you that he's in Old Testament earnestness
about it: "The radio won't play this song/ They call this rebel music/ But
how can you refuse it, children of Moses?"

‹ With reporting by Jessica Desvarieux / Port-au-Prince