Haiti on the Brink of Collapse: For a Final Transition of Patriotic Technocrats

Haiti has reached a historical breaking point. The state no longer functions, public authority has disappeared from large portions of the national territory. The economy is paralyzed, and the population is subjected to permanent insecurity. The First Black Republic of the New World, born from a revolution that founded political modernity, is today threatened with functional disappearance.

Since the fall of the long Duvalier dictatorship in 1986, the country has been mired in chronic instability. In nearly forty years, thirteen transitional governments have succeeded one another. None has managed to refound the state by endowing it with a new societal project, to restore national sovereignty, or to establish lasting institutions. Transition, meant to be an exceptional passage, has become a perpetual system of governance, marked by improvisation, irresponsibility, and failure.

These transitions have produced one result: the continuous weakening of the state. They failed because they were conceived without a national vision, captured by petty or particular interests, and often subjected to external logics of the country. Far from responding to popular aspirations, they have exacerbated the rift between society and those who claim to lead it.

The most recent and catastrophic transitional experience has only confirmed the total exhaustion of this model. Incapable of restoring public and national security, of governing with dignity and efficiency, or of restoring collective trust, it has reinforced the feeling of abandonment and anger. One fact is now clear: the crisis can no longer be managed by traditional political mechanisms, which are at the root of the deviations of the Transitional Presidential Council (CPT) and almost all previous transitions.

Faced with the near-total collapse of the state, a new transition is de facto necessary. But it cannot and must not be just another transition to allow opportunists to prepare for their old age. Reproducing the same patterns would precipitate the country into irreversible chaos. This transition must be ultimate, not out of naive opportunism, but because Haiti no longer has any margin for error.

This ultimate transition must clearly break with the partitocratic practices that have led to failure: the sharing of power as an end in itself, the privatization of the state, the race for easy wealth, institutionalized corruption, and structural dependence. It is no longer about managing the crisis, but about 'saving' what remains of the Haitian state.

In this extreme context, the only credible option is, as Mr. Ted Saint-Dic already proposes, a transition entrusted to patriotic technocrats who understand administration and power. Not managers disconnected from reality, but competent, qualified, integral, honest women and men, independent of discredited political structures and deeply committed to the issue of national sovereignty. Their legitimacy would not come from ballots or polls, but from their ability to serve the general interest in a period of exception.