Wyclef Jean to Run for President of Haiti

Hip-hop music, more than most pop genres, is something of a pulpit, urban fire and brimstone garbed in baggy pants and backward caps. As a child of the Haitian diaspora, Haitian-American superstar Wyclef Jean, and the son of a Nazarene preacher to a modern-day Moses, destined to return and lead his people out of bondage.
  Just last week,  Haitian-American superstar Wyclef Jean, told CNN: “I can’t sing forever” after word got out that he might be running for president in his native Haiti. And now Haiti’s biggest representer has officially confirmed to the media that he is running for president of Haiti! He is due to officially announce his candidacy today, just a few days shy of Saturday’s deadline.

In a video posted to Time.com, Wyclef, 37, said the devastating earthquake that occurred in his homeland at the top of the year (that killed more than 200,000 people and left millions homeless) helped him make his decision:

    “If not for the earthquake, I probably would have waited another 10 years before doing this. The quake drove home to me that Haiti can’t wait another 10 years for us to bring it into the 21st century. If I can’t take five years out to serve my country as president, then everything I’ve been singing about, like equal rights, doesn’t mean anything. My decision is a draft. I’ve been drafted by the youth.”

Jean says that he meets all of the qualifications required to run for president, including living in Haiti for at least 5 consecutive years. He also owns property there and has never been a citizen of another country (he’s considered a “resident” of the United States). In addition, his Yele Haiti Foundation has worked overtime this year to raise funds to assist the island nation with recovery efforts following the earthquake that pretty much wrecked the country.

So even though we wouldn’t say that he’s 100% “qualified” (with no political background), we don’t see why he can’t give it a shot! Let’s be real now, the country can’t get any worse…
. Jean told TIME he is going to announce his candidacy for the Nov. 28 election just days before the Aug. 7 deadline. One plan, loaded with as much Mosaic symbolism as a news cycle can hold, called for him to declare his presidential bid on Aug. 5 upon arriving in Port-au-Prince from New York, where he grew up after leaving Haiti with his family at age 9.
Accentuating the Positive
Jean's celebrity candidacy at least promises to keep an erratic media more regularly focused on Haiti's awful situation. International donors have pledged some $10 billion in aid, but mountains of shattered concrete still choke Port-au-Prince's streets, and more than a million people remain homeless, trapped in squalid tent cities as a sclerotic bureaucracy and loosely organized aid groups struggle to relocate them to decent temporary shelters. The Caribbean hurricane season, which reaches its peak in about a month, threatens to make conditions even uglier. (See exclusive pictures of the destruction in Haiti.)

Jean has spent most of his life trying to show the world the positive side of star-crossed Haiti. Despite his Brooklyn and New Jersey upbringing — he recalls weekly "beat up a Haitian" days at his schools — he proudly embraced the nation, even when, in the 1980s and '90s, Haiti was an abject byword for boat people, AIDS and dictators. "A lot of us focused on assimilation in the U.S.," says Jean's younger brother Sam, a New York City entertainment lawyer. "Clef was unabashedly proud to be Haitian long before it was in vogue." So much so that Jean never took U.S. citizenship, instead carrying a Haitian passport on his international concert tours.

Jean brought Haiti and its culture into his Grammy-winning music too. As a member of the groundbreaking hip-hop group the Fugees (short for refugees ) in the mid-'90s and then as a solo act, Jean built kompa, rasin and other Haitian rhythms into hits like "Gone Till November." His work earned him a reputation as Haiti's Bob Marley, helping foreigners unearth a vibrant culture so often buried under the misery. Not that he left out the misery: like Marley's songs, Jean's exude a raw but poetic social content. The video for his 2007 hit "Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill)," which examines exploitation both sexual and national, is set in a camp for refugees facing deportation.

Now he wants to move beyond music. Jean has become so involved with not just the culture but also the cause of Haiti that he feels it's only logical to follow other artist-to-statesman career trajectories. (He mentions Ronald Reagan and former Czech President Vaclav Havel as examples of the type.) Yéle Haiti has secured scholarships and aid for thousands of destitute Haitian kids. Since the earthquake, the Yéle Corps has given Haitians jobs removing rubble and housing the displaced. Jean sits through the kind of development conferences in Washington and Europe that would bore most do-gooder celebs to tears. "I want to be part of a different kind of celebrity," he says, "one that thinks not just about charity but policy." He's been noticed. In 2007, Haitian President René Préval appointed Jean an ambassador-at-large.