Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

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Haiti: Government and Politics
extracted wealth from the population. Citizens therefore
expected little or nothing from the state. Rather, reflected by
the fact that the Creole word for state
leta— also means
"bully," they saw government as an entity that confiscated,
taxed, prohibited, or imprisoned. The notion of government
working in partnership with its people, respecting a social contract
to help improve all citizens' standing within the society,
has been an abstraction.
The Haitian government also traditionally served as a source
of jobs. Payrolls of state ministries and state enterprises were
inflated by leaders with cronies and family members, some of
whom, the infamous zonbi (zombie) employees, appeared only
to collect their salaries. Political favoritism and bribery plagued
the system. Social scientists have used terms such as kleptocracy,
predatory state,
government-by-franchise, and auto colonization to
describe the Haitian system of taxation, patronage, corruption,
public monopolies, and private monopolies protected by the
state.
The Haitian state developed a relatively elaborate apparatus
for taxing average citizens, but it provided them few public services.
As a result, Haitians have relied heavily on foreign-assistance
agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) , and
remittances from abroad to receive or purchase services provided
by most other governments. Education, for example, has
been the Haitian government's most elaborate public-service
sector, but the majority of children attend costly private
schools. The state's abdication of its role as service provider
created a situation in which foreign-assistance agencies and the
NGOs they support served as a kind of shadow government.
Government institutions in Port-au-Prince have provided the
facade of public services through the Ministry of Public Health
and Population; the Ministry of Agriculture, Natural
Resources, and Rural Development; the Ministry of National
Education, Youth, and Sports; and others. These ministries
have had no representatives in most rural areas, however, and
they have provided relatively few services even in Port-au-
Prince. Government budgets for public services generally
accounted for salaries, but they provided little or no support
for program implementation.
In addition to the armed forces, the main Haitian institution
bringing in revenue has been the customs house. The state also
extracted wealth through its control over certain essential services
and through public and private monopoly ownership of
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