Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Welcome to the age of sleb politics

Once, pop stars and actors were content with vast riches and public adulation. Now celebrities want to run countries. Rod Liddle despairs of the new world order in which Wyclef Jean wants to be President of Haiti and Bono is taken seriously

Is the hip hop artist Wyclef Jean the right sort of person to run Haiti? He has announced that he will run for the country’s presidential election as the candidate of the Viv Ansanm (Live Together) party. Wyclef is wanted in the United States, where he made his fortune, on tax avoidance issues. The IRS is claiming $2.1 million in back taxes from him. Added to that there are allegations that he salted away an estimated $400,000 from a charity he set up to, er, relieve the suffering in Haiti following the earthquake which struck the benighted country in January this year.

In fact ‘salted away’ is not the technical term — ‘mishandled’ is the technical term. So things are looking pretty good for him then, given the precedents in Hispaniola. Most former presidents of the world’s first free black republic have owed large amounts of money to the US and defrauded their own people, so Wyclef Jean is pursuing an admirably traditionalist line. Also, he has started to refer to himself, when talking to the press, in the third person, which is often early evidence of a psychopathic personality type and always evidence of monumental arrogance and delusions of grandeur.

This is crucial. If he is to gain the sort of support he needs to eventually rule Haiti, he will need to be a bona fide psychopath, like the Duvaliers. Also, just as a tip, I suggest Wyclef marries a goat. One of Haiti’s most respected former presidents, François Antoine Simon, had a daughter who married a goat called Simalo. Simalo was also a close confidante of the president. This daughter, Celestina, later divorced Simalo acrimoniously and the poor goat was subsequently bumped off by shadowy agents. But François made sure Simalo was buried with full honours in a proper coffin.

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