Feuille de route d’Haïti : Un consortium guidé par le secteur privé peut-il assurer la sécurité, les élections et la réforme ?

Haiti’s Feuille de Route: Can a Private Sector-led Consortium Deliver on Security, Elections, and Reform?

By Patrick Prézeau Stephenson (Le Français suit)

PORT-AU-PRINCE — Haiti’s transitional roadmap, adopted by the Presidential Council earlier this year, rests on three pillars: stabilizing security, organizing credible elections, and launching constitutional reform. On paper, these are state functions. In practice, the Haitian state is brittle, its institutions gutted by years of crisis, corruption, and capture. Into that vacuum steps an unlikely actor: the private sector.

At the center is an alliance of Haitian business leaders who present themselves as a logistical backbone and coordination engine. The question, however, is not only whether they can deliver, but whether they can do so with legitimacy, accountability, and without repeating the sins of elite capture that have long fueled Haiti’s governance failures.

Security: Corridors, Not Sovereignty

Haiti’s security crisis is acute. Gangs have carved Port-au-Prince into armed archipelagos, while the Artibonite Valley—the country’s rice bowl—has been terrorized by kidnappings and forced displacement.

The private sector’s most tangible contribution could be “protected service corridors”: port-to-hospital, port-to-school, or fuel-to-clinic lanes, managed with GPS tracking, tamper-proof sealing, and pay-for-performance security compacts. In theory, such corridors could reduce stockouts of medicine, keep schools open, and stabilize prices by cutting down on extortion.

But the dangers are real. Corridor security risks morphing into private taxation, a shadow sovereignty imposed by business rather than the state. To avoid this, oversight must be radical: public dashboards in Creole and French, grievance hotlines, civil society seats on monitoring boards, and immediate suspension for abuses. The goal is to bridge—not replace—the state.

Elections: Logistics Without Politics

The Haitian private sector can move ballots, generators, and fuel. It can warehouse sensitive materials and ensure tabulation centers stay lit. These are non-trivial contributions in a country where power outages and hijacked convoys are the norm.

Yet elections are legitimacy machines. If the private sector strays into vetting candidates, or managing results, it contaminates the process. What is viable is a narrow logistics role—delivering kits on time, publishing procurement ledgers, and rehearsing nationwide distribution drills. What is not viable is any partisan perception of control.

The test is simple: can ballots arrive intact and on time at 90 percent of polling stations? If so, the state’s electoral machinery has a fighting chance.

Constitutional Reform: Convening, Not Drafting

Perhaps the least visible but most profound test is constitutional reform. Haitian think-tanks could fund neutral consultation forums, cover travel stipends for women’s groups and rural associations, and underwrite non-partisan civic guides explaining the stakes.

But here, neutrality is everything. If business leaders use their financial muscle to push specific provisions—on land, taxation, or diaspora rights—they risk discrediting the process. Independent auditors, real-time donor disclosure, and a firewall between financing and content are essential.

The benchmark is not whether elites agree on a draft, but whether ordinary Haitians feel heard—through packed public forums, published transcripts, and a transparent synthesis of consensus and disagreements.

The Structural Question

The Manifesto Appel du Lambi warns that Haiti’s future cannot be outsourced to elites who helped create the present disaster. The Haitian private sector embodies this tension: it has capacity, but it lacks popular trust.

The roadmap’s promise is narrow wins—functioning corridors, a rehearsal election drill, a dozen inclusive forums—that slowly restore credibility. Its peril is concentration of contracts, opacity in execution, and security compacts that resemble privatized fiefdoms.

Bottom Line

The private sector in Haiti is not a savior. At best, it is a stopgap executor—a mover of goods, a manager of corridors, a funder of neutral spaces. Its comparative advantage is discipline and logistics, not legitimacy.

If it delivers transparently—publishing ledgers, rotating providers, and seating civil society in oversight—it can buy time and space for the state to reassert itself. If it slides into opacity and capture, it will reinforce the very structures the Manifesto warns against: elites ruling through shadow governance, with the people once again spectators in their own democracy.

Haiti’s feuille de route is fragile. Whether the private sector plays the role of bridge or barrier will define whether this transition opens into possibility—or collapses into another cycle of betrayal.