For the poor in Haiti, government shutdown has little effect

Aljazeera

For some Haitians, the legislative and constitutional crisis paralyzing this Caribbean country seems planets away. Despite the street protests calling for the president to step down and a political crisis unlike any the country had seen in years, most Haitians watch from the sidelines. In areas like Canaan, the government has little impact on people’s lives. Residents remain preoccupied with the continuing fallout of the earthquake and nonexistent state services, and they are disillusioned after years of political impasse and broken promises.

The 2010 earthquake, which killed more than 200,000 people and upended the lives of millions, had a devastating impact on the government’s ability to function. Some 17 percent of Haiti’s civil service was killed. The presidential palace, the parliament building and 28 of the 29 ministry buildings in the capital were damaged beyond repair.

Five years on, there are some clear signs of progress. Rubble that once littered the streets has been cleared. Many of the hundreds of thousands of displaced people, who once sheltered in makeshift camps across the city, have moved to more permanent housing. Government buildings, including a new Supreme Court, are being constructed.

But progress has been slow and uneven. In the past few years, tens of thousands of people were forcefully evicted from camps and pushed further into poverty and insecurity, according to Amnesty International. The United Nations estimates that at least 85,000 people still live in camps. Many of the promises made after the earthquake, including new jobs, the construction of tens of thousands of homes and other projects under the objective of helping the country build back better have been slow to realize.

“People live in precarious conditions,” said Nixon Boumba, a community organizer from the Mouvman Demokratik Popilè, a local civil society organization. “They are more and more interested in satisfying their immediate needs.”

The controversial 2010 elections, held shortly after the earthquake, left the government on an unstable footing. Martelly, who entered office in 2011, has not called for legislative elections for three years. Opposition lawmakers have also blocked steps toward a vote, saying he has taken a series of unconstitutional steps that would allow him unfair influence over any elections.

With no decision between the legislative and executive branches over elections, on Monday the terms of a third of Haiti’s Senate and those of the entire House of Deputies expired, leaving the president to rule by decree. Opposition organizers vowed to step up their efforts, calling it the final stage of Operation Burkina Faso, named after the popular uprising that in October 2014 toppled a president who had ruled for 27 years in the West African country.

Despite the lack of governance and rule of law reaching a new low in Haiti, in many locales, the government shutdown has not yet been widely felt. Haiti has the second-largest income disparity in the world, according to the World Bank. In such conditions, along with the political impasse and slow distribution of aid, some say the state’s impact on some disenfranchised populations has been minimal.