Tag Archives: President Martelly

Jul 12 2011

MARTELLY NEEDS TO PUT ON SOME WEIGHT

Politics is a weight game; if you are politically weak, do not get on the field trying to play it. Otherwise, you are going to get badly and shamefully injured.

As it stands now, President Martelly is politically weak and frail; his political base is totally unstructured and unorganized. He needs to work on putting on some political weight (in parallel) as he is tackling many things at once.

If I were to advise him, I would tell him to put in place a committee of political strategists and experts to work on the formation of a structured political party to solidify and strengthen his political base. That party should be heavily active and represented in the country and in the Diaspora.

If you take a glance at the makeup of the Parliament, you will quickly realize that President Martelly has no real political weight in there. So that is bad business for him. He needs to work on changing the makeup of that body as soon as possible.

The only democratic way the makeup of our legislature can be changed is through democratic elections. And the only way he can have people sharing his philosophy of change in that body is if and only if he has a solid political party that could get them elected in the next elections.

President Martelly ran a campaign on the promise to change our politics, develop our economy and revolutionize our society. All these things he promised could be just empty rhetoric if he does not have a political structure in place.

Revolutions (political, economic and social) take time to mature. In other words, you do not see the results of a revolutionary movement in five years -the presidential term of service in Haiti. This is something that could take a quarter of a century before you start seeing results.

So President Martelly needs to have that structure in place that could carry the spirit and philosophy of that vision of change beyond his term in office. That is what you call durable and sustainable change.

It is going to be very difficult for the President to advance his political agenda without a majority in the legislature to back him up. That is how politics works. So he must sit down with the GPR-Inite concentration in the Parliament to see how they can work out their differences and arrive at a consensus on the choice of the Prime Minister to pass this congressional gridlock.

Let us face it. After President Obama lost the House of Representatives to the Republicans last November, the game has changed; the political calculus has shifted. So he had to put on hold some elements of his ambitious progressive agenda to deal with the conservative leadership in Congress. That’s exactly what President Martelly is going to have to do for the time being -until he strengthens his ranks and gets his troops in the chambers of Congress.

My political instinct tells me that more than likely Gousse is not going to be ratified. If my prediction is right, President Martelly is going to have to designate someone else to be his Prime Minister. This time, he should ask the GPR-Inite elements to do two things:

1) Write down the profile of someone they would ratify without a doubt (hopefully, this is something all the parties would agree upon)

2) Send over to him a list of five names of people they would ratify, which he could choose the Prime Minister from.

Once he secures these two things from the Parliament, he will form an independent team of trusted experts/advisers to thoroughly vet each and every single one of them. Once the vetting process is over, they will recommend the best and most suitable person for the job to him. Then that is the name he will send forth to Senator Joazil -the President of the General Assembly.

The GPR-Inite guys cannot continue to play their game for long. Eventually, that game they are playing will get old; they will be running out of options. The President needs to play with a winning state of mind that game these guys are playing. He needs to be patient and stay focused on getting the head of his government ratified, solidifying his political base and changing the makeup of the Parliament so he could get his political, economic and social reforms on the way.

Jul 7 2011

WE DO NOT NEED A PRIME MINISTER IN HAITI

This article 137 of the Haitian Constitution of 1987 is an article of political crisis. It stipulates:

“The President of the Republic shall choose a Prime Minister from among the members of the majority party of the Parliament. In the absence of such a majority, the President of the Republic shall choose his Prime Minister in consultation with the President of the Senate and the President of the House of Deputies.”

Who are the geniuses that crafted this article? I would love to meet them simply to shake their hands for such a job well done. They really know how to mess things up for the country.

I want someone to answer me this question: Why do we even have a Prime Minister when we have a head of state elected by the people through a national election?

Listen to this idiocy: the Prime Minister, after being ratified by the Parliament, must receive an up or down vote in a joint session of Congress, depending on his or her declaration of “politique generale.”

How do we vote the president in Haiti, folks? Don’t we vote him or her based on his or her political agenda or “politique generale?” If so, what sense does it make to have a Prime Minister repeat the same process before the members of Congress?

The way it is now, this article 137 is a Constitutional provision for these thieves, drug dealers, crooks, birdbrained, traitors sitting in the Parliament to take the country in hostage, making it extremely difficult for President Martelly to get started with solving the people’s problems. Logically, these guys are getting paid to worsen every single day that goes by the situation of the country.

I said it before and I am going it again: we do not need a Prime Minister in Haiti. It is a waste of time.

The Prime Minister position is one created to get one more corrupted person in the government of the country to steal and further perpetuate the system of corruption.

We need a President and a Vice President on a ticket together -just like it is done here in the States. When the people vote, they vote the ticket containing the President and the Vice President. Like that, you will only have the different ministers, chosen by the President (after they have been vetted, of course), to be approved by the members of Congress. It makes more sense to me like that.

Jun 30 2011

A POLITICAL CESAREAN SECTION INEVITABLE IN HAITI

In obstetrics, a Cesarean Section is viewed as an extreme or last resort measure to safely deliver a fetus whose life is in peril and still save the mother’s life.

In politics, depending on the situation, we have to go against our political goodwill to take such route and save a multitude or a republic in peril.

So PRESIDENT MARTELLY may have to fortify his testicles and proceed with a POLITICAL CESAREAN SECTION by:

1. destroying the legislature;

2. voting a new Constitution -one free of Constitutional deadlocks;

3. organizing a new legislative election to put in place a new parliament to get this country to breathe again

The full implementation of such procedure should not take more than a year.

This may not be, of course, a popular measure but one worth taking. Leaders don’t do what’s popular; they do, rather, what is right.

A POLITICAL CESAREAN SECTION is not a measure I would have supported if one were to talk to me about it last week. But when I take a closer look at the political landscape, this is what President Martelly is gonna have to do IF he wants to be a successful president for his people.

This Constitution and this legislature are instruments of deadlock to literally kill Haiti. Something must be done, and that something must be done now. It is that urgent.

Haiti has been in labor for a quarter of a century; her chance of surviving a normal delivery is dangerously slim. The only way to spare her life and that of the fetus is to proceed with a POLITICAL CESAREAN SECTION by doing the three things proposed above. Other than that, all of us need to get ourselves mentally and physically prepared for death management.

Jun 3 2011

PRESIDENT MARTELLY: KEEP THE CHURCH & THE STATE SEPARATED

President Martelly of Haiti

President Martelly of Haiti

In this article entitled “Attention Danger!!!” published yesterday, Thursday, June 02, 2011 on the Radio Kiskeya website, the author, Lyonel Trouillot, did a tremendous job calling President Martelly out on his issuance of the executive order making Ascension (a Catholic Holiday) a National Holiday. http://www.radiokiskeya.com/spip.php?article7793

The issuance of that executive order was a reckless and miscalculated move on the part of the president. Doing so, he opens the door for people (friends and foes) to question his motives. Many, myself included, tend to assume that, by that decision, he is favoring the Catholic Church over the other religious conglomerates.

There is no question that the president was ill-advised. Whoever advised him to issue that executive order making Ascension a National Holiday has shown lack of democratic judgment; therefore, he or she has no place in the president’s team of advisers. Such decision is an embarrassment, and it is making the president look very bad. What has happened of the basic democratic concept of separation of church and state?

The democratic concept of separation of church and state demands that the state be kept away from matters of faith. As Mr. Trouillot eloquently stated in the piece in corroboration of the aforementioned notion, “The duty of the state and the government is to assure free exercise of religion and atheism by the citizens in their private domains.”

During and after the campaign, Candidate and President-elect Martelly had met many times with many leaders from the Protestant and Catholic communities; not even once, as far as I can recall, has he met with Max Beauvoir, the Ati or Supreme Chief of the Vodou religion. I was very bothered by that. This is suspicious on his part, and he needs to come clean on that.

Vodou, as a religion, had suffered in the past many atrocities from many of our political and Catholic and Protestant leaders. Today, we will not stand by anyone’s action sought purposely or otherwise to ostracize or treat it as a second class religion.

If the president claims to be of a certain faith, that is his business, not that of the state. Therefore, regardless what that faith is, in the exercise of his presidential duty, he needs to separate it from his handling of the affairs of the state.

Haiti is not a theocracy; it is a democracy. So we are calling on President Martelly and his advisers to keep in mind that this executive order has set a bad precedent for our democracy. Please, Mr. President, for the sake of our democracy, keep the state out of matters having to do with faith. This is not what we are paying you for.

May 26 2011

DANIEL ROUZIER: THE CHOICE FOR THE FUTURE

Daniel Gerard Rouzier

I don’t mind playing politics, for politics itself is a tricky game of chess. What I cannot stand, though, is when politicians are playing backyard politics with something that could best serve the common interests of all the citizens of a nation.

I could not believe my ears when I heard on the news that some of these so-called politicians in Haiti were putting people on the trail protesting the nomination of Daniel Gerard ROUZIER as Prime Minister -an honest, decent, proven, competent and qualified Haitian man.

Some of his detractors or so-called opponents have gone as far as calling him a racist mulatto only in their attempts to dive in their class warfare or race politics which has gotten us in the quagmire we find ourselves today. This is the kind of divisive, close-minded and obsolete politics we do not need and are running away from.

No one Haitian should be submitted to a race or identity test in order to occupy a political or elected position in Haiti. I, a dark-skinned Haitian, cannot claim being more Haitian or loving Haiti more than Rouzier, a light-skinned Haitian. This is a stupid and silly argument which I am not going to lose my valuable time to get into. I leave that to these stupid and retarded Haitian politicians; stupid heads make stupid arguments.

When will these “ratdokale” politicians ever get it? We the people have spoken loud and clear (with 67+% in the last presidential election) that we don’t need you people anywhere near our political turf. Please go away! Find other hobbies to occupy your time; politics is not your forte. In fact, the accession of President Martelly to the highest office of the land can attest to that. Such choice symbolizes a solid line drawn in the sand between the past and the future.

I have seen in ROUZIER exactly what I have ever wanted to see in a Prime Minister  -youth, competence, freshness of ideas, leadership, visionary, compassion, love for Haiti and its people, discipline, toughness, a man/woman of principle, knowledge (in terms of how capitalism and the global economy work).

He is a great choice for the country -one that shows you exactly where President Martelly wants to take the country in this 21st century, in the post-Preval-Aristide era.

We -the new generation Haitians -will not sit idly letting these bozos mess up the country any further. Time has changed, so must be our politics.

I am calling on Senator Joazile, the big man running the nomination process in the legislature, to use his sense of political cleverness and astuteness and not let partisan politics blind him.

So assuming that everything is legit with ROUZIER in terms of the constitutional recommendations, for the betterment of our beloved country, he must be ratified. Politics should NOT stop him, not this time. I am urging Senator Joazile to get his troops on board and ratify the president’s choice. ROUZIER is the choice for the future.

May 22 2011

MY WORD OF ADVICE TO PRESIDENT MARTELLY

President Michel J. Martelly

I am going to go straight in this to tell you to stop playing games with these politicians in the legislature. Most of these guys do not have the people’s best interest at heart; they are driven by partisan politics.

As you can see, they are out to control several key ministries –agriculture, education, interior, justice, etc… -representing the pillars of your agenda.

You campaigned on reforming the education system, restoring the authority of the state, strengthening our economy through a total reform of our agriculture, reforming our justice system, etc… If you let them gain control of these key agencies, you are doomed.

This is your first political clash with that body; you’ve got to win to show these vultures in the Senate and the House of Deputies that you can pull some muscles. This is a psychological warfare, which you must win by any means necessary.

If anything, follow Obama’s footsteps. You cannot go wrong if you do. Here is what David Axelrod had President Obama do (By the way, he is President Obama’s top political strategist): To get the health care bill ratified in both chambers of Congress, he, after realizing that the Republicans and the Blue Dog Democrats were playing politics with the bill, had the president traveled across the country on campaign mode to promote the bill and thereby got the people to rally behind him. Had he not done so, the bill would have not passed.

That’s exactly what you ought to be doing. Don’t forget that politics is a weight game. Don’t be too quick to negotiate, for it is very unwise to negotiate in a position of weakness. You don’t have any political base in the legislature. Your strength is in/with the people; therefore, reach out to them to put pressure on the parliament to have the choice of ROUZIER approved. You’ve got to win this.