Politics
Haiti: Mixed record for President Michel Martelly after 1 year in office
Haiti President Michel Martelly. PHOTO/File
In a country where the news is typically bad, if not catastrophic, many people in Haiti look at the past year under a musician-turned-president with guarded surprise.
Yes, parliament and President Michel Martelly were in a standoff that hobbled government much of the past 12 months. Yes, less than a quarter of the population has a formal job. And yes, cholera and many other problems still haunt the country.
Yet six of the most visible displaced-persons camps that sprang up after the 2010 earthquake have been cleared and several are back to being public plazas; renovations are far along at the international airport; a sprinkling of new hotels and shops have begun to emerge across the capital’s otherwise ruined landscape; and in a country where free education is rare, the government, for the first time, has covered school tuition for 1 million children.
It’s hardly a Golden Age. But it’s not bad either for a leader who had never held political office and was best known for often-raunchy musical performances before he took office a year ago Monday. The achievements have come with a parliament so dominated by the party of the man Martelly defeated in his run for president that lawmakers stonewalled his attempts to appoint a prime minister and Cabinet for three-quarters of the year.
“Things with President Michel Martelly are working for the most part,” said Yrinen Jean-Baptiste, a 34-year-old mother of two children who voted for the musician and says that, so far, she would be willing do so again. “I hope he can do more.”
Asked to grade himself on a 1-10 scale, the president, who isn’t known for modesty, grades himself high.
“I would give myself an eight, eight-and-half, a nine, because everything I did I did without a government,” Martelly said in an interview with The Associated Press. “Everything I did, I did at a time when I had so many problems, when so many people tried to stop me. Everything I did, I did whether the money was there or not.”
