Haiti: Many Graduates, Very Few Intellectuals; The Observation of a Political Shipwreck Organized by an Elite Without Vocation

Haiti is not only in a security crisis. It is in intellectual bankruptcy. Never has the country had so many graduates. Never has it been so poor in thought. The contrast is obscene: university degrees churned out, but no moral backbone to stand up to the political collapse. Dr. Jean Price Mars would have spoken of collective bovarism, to criticize the lack of a sense of duty among Haitian intellectuals. The problem is not the absence of schools. The problem is the absence of courage. A deficit of doctrine and love for the homeland. For years, the political class has multiplied provisional governments, interminable transitions, opaque agreements, and sterile dialogues. Names change, methods remain: opacity, improvisation, absence of vision. A nation is not governed by administering survival. And at the heart of this disaster, where are the graduates? They occupy ministries, advise cabinets, draft technical notes, participate in commissions. They master institutional jargon, speak of “inclusive approach,” “roadmap,” “macroeconomic stability.” But they remain silent on the essentials: the collapse of the State, the capture of institutions, the trivialization of crime, endemic corruption. Haiti is suffocating under the weight of competent graduates… serving an incompetent and inept system. An intellectual does not merely manage procedures. They question meaning. They denounce deviation. They refuse to be the technical alibi for a power without legitimacy. Yet, too often, our educated elites become the clerks of an organized disorder. They rationalize irrationality. They dress political bankruptcy in expertise. The current crisis did not fall from the sky. It is the product of years of learned compromises. Each makeshift transition has been validated by graduate jurists. Each opaque budget has been structured by certified economists. Each aborted reform has been conceived by technocrats laden with titles. The country is burning. The elites are writing reports. In a Republic worthy of the name, the intellectual plays a watchdog role. They alert before disaster. They refuse soft consensuses. They produce national strategic thought. In Haiti, the majority of graduates prefer proximity to power over critical distance. Positions are negotiated, not principles, under the pretext that a hungry belly has no ears. I would say a greedy elite has no balls. Silence has become a career. While entire neighborhoods fall under the sway of armed groups, while sovereignty crumbles, while youth exile themselves or enlist out of despair, how many academics publish a structured reflection on the rebuilding of the State? How many professionals publicly refuse to endorse political arrangements contrary to the national interest? Faced with the harsh reality of the country, our graduates have chosen individual advancement rather than collective demand. The university, too, must respond. Distributing bachelor's and master's degrees is not enough. Training critical minds is a far more demanding mission. However, critical thinking disturbs power. And in a system where political proximity guarantees opportunities, free thought becomes a risk. Thus the cycle perpetuates: weak governments surrounded by brilliant but cautious technicians; consequential decisions made without serious intellectual debate; a nation deprived of a compass. Haiti does not only need elections. It needs an insurrection of intelligence. Of intellectuals capable of breaking with technocratic servitude. Of women and men ready to lose a position to save an idea. Ready to denounce imposture, even when it wears an official suit. For as long as graduates continue to serve power instead of enlightening the nation, the political management of the country will remain a theater of improvisation. The Elite will remain enslaved to criminal causes. And the Republic, deprived of true intellectuals, will continue to sink under the polite applause of its own elites. Jean Mapou / Le Relief