At every turning point in history, the elite could have corrected unjust norms, reformed broken institutions, built on what worked, created a new order. Instead, it chose the opposite: violating rules rather than changing them, postponing what could be done today, cultivating chaos rather than embracing the discipline of genuine progress. Its only compass has been appetite, and the entire country the price of that appetite.
Haiti’s elite has never lacked resources – cultural, symbolic, and economic capital, networks, access to the world. What it has lacked is courage. Rather than imagine a new order, it prefers to twist the old one into absurdity. Rather than reform obsolete norms, it knowingly violates them, reducing law to a matter of convenience. This rejection of reform has kept Haiti trapped in a vicious cycle where survival outweighs progress and instability is institutionalized.
In a few months, the 1987 Constitution- the normative framework that has given chaos its form- will turn thirty-nine. Its failure in both application and applicability has been pointed out time and again.
And with every attempt to institutionalize chaos through “political transition,” some have tried to see in it the chance to found a new order through a new Constitution. Indeed, this was meant to be one of the great projects of the current transition. But there is no rush to end a system that serves them so well.
A new Constitution would mean curtailing the prospect of yet another transition five years from now. To eliminate the possibility of perpetual transition? What would become of an elite that survives only, by it? Predictably, it will find every excuse to return, as if by enchantment, to the 1987 Constitution.
And yet we know this Constitution cannot function in a country plagued by such deep anthropological fractures. Prepare, then, for contested elections and another transition within five years of the next legitimate president’s inauguration. It is not that Haiti could never have made the 1987 Constitution work, but that no one defends the collective. Everyone defends his own self-interest. The framework is inadequate to such a social reality.
The bankruptcy of an elite is measured in the smallness of its ambitions. Here, ambition reduces to feeding one’s greed: import to resell, accumulate to consume, manipulate the system to remain,entrenched. The country has been reduced to a survival marketplace, devoid of vision, bereft of collective purpose. Appetite has replaced nationhood. Where builders are needed, we find only profiteers of misery.
By rejecting order in favor of chaos, part of the elite has found violence to be its tacit ally. Gangs thrive not only on poverty but also because higher interests profit from anarchy. Disorder has become a tool of power: when the law is unpredictable, everything can be negotiated, bought, violated. In such a climate, the citizen loses hope, the state loses legitimacy, society loses its future.
This embrace of chaos, institutionalized through endless transition, spares no one. The appetite of some cannot conceal the deprivation of others. Insecurity, the exodus of youth and talent, the collapse of institutions- these are the prices paid by all, including those who imagined their walls and privileges could protect them. A ruined country eventually engulfs those who ruined it.
Haiti can rise again only by breaking with this logic of greed and self-interest. It requires an elite willing to sacrifice immediate comfort for a collective project, willing to accept the rigor of reform over the ease of disorder. Four conditions are essential:
- Refound the norms, beginning with the Constitution: change the rules instead of bypassing them.
- Invest in education: transform self-interest into intellect, and greed into vision.
- Break with chaos and its corollary, transition: dismantle the criminal collusions that nourish anarchy; make elections the only path to power.
- Launch a different economic model: build an economy rooted in decentralized creation and shared wealth.
Haiti does not need an elite content to satisfy its appetite; it needs an elite able to open new horizons.
This is not simply a moral matter- it is a question of national survival. So long as the elite prefers violating norms to changing them, so long as it chooses chaos to protect its self-interest, it will remain complicit in the destruction of the nation.
Gentlemen, history will remember your rejection of change as a lasting indictment, a condemnation.
The country, however, will no longer wait.
Rénald Lubérice 