When Leaders Choose Power Over Purpose On
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February 28, 2026 | Written By: Dr. Darline Wilkenson
On Accountability, Sovereignty & The Reckoning We Can No Longer Delay
The Day We Believed
February 7, 1986. People poured into the streets of Port-au-Prince before dawn. Men wept. Women held their children toward the sky. Someone’s grandmother, who had never danced in public, danced. After 29 years of Duvalier terror, after 30,000 souls swallowed by darkness, after the systematic looting of our national dignity, we thought we were finally free.
Forty years later, I find myself sitting with a question that will not leave me: What happened to that freedom? Because here is the unbearable truth. We did not simply fail to build a democracy. We watched, in slow motion, as our sovereignty was eaten alive. Some devoured from within. Much consumed from without. And those who dared to say so out loud were too often left standing alone.
A Voice I Could Not Ignore
Recently, I came across an interview on Haiti Inter that stopped me cold. Ginette Chérubin, former Minister of Women’s Affairs, former CEP member, and author of: “Le Ventre Pourri De La Bête”, described with quiet precision how Haiti’s 2010 elections were dismantled through a graduated series of foreign pressures: diplomatic smiles first, then warnings, then manipulation, then threats. She was the only CEP member who refused to sign the results. The vote totals that were published, she later confirmed, were not the ones the Director General had submitted.
The will of the Haitian people was simply rearranged.
I did not need that interview to tell me what I already knew. But hearing a woman who held the pen and refused to sign speak that truth with such calm conviction, brought into sharp relief something I have spent my career studying and writing about.
True leadership is not about the position you hold.
It is about what you refuse to do with it.
We Traded One Tyrant for a Thousand
Chérubin’s testimony is not an isolated incident. It is one chapter in a 40-year pattern. When Duvalier left in 1986, Haiti did not gain freedom. We traded a visible tyrant for an invisible architecture of control. The 2003 Ottawa Initiative, where foreign powers gathered to decide Haiti’s future without a single Haitian at the table, is not conspiracy. It is documented history. These are the same nations that formed the Core Group, the same bloc that has shaped, pressured, and at critical moments overridden our political process ever since. They called themselves friends of Haiti. Friends do not arrive with an agenda already written and ask whether your independence is “immutable.”
But external interference did not destroy Haiti alone. It had collaborators. A political class so addicted to corruption, so shielded by impunity, so committed to exclusion, that it finished what foreign interests started. Today, 90% of Port-au-Prince is controlled by armed gangs. The Artibonite has fallen. The first victims are always women, because the body of a woman has always been the battlefield where cowards wage their wars against communities. We did not arrive here by accident. We arrived here through decades of leadership failure, compounded and left unpunished.
The Leadership Crisis Behind Every Other Crisis
I have spent my career studying organizational leadership, and I will tell you what forty years of Haitian political history confirms: every crisis you see, the gangs, the corruption, the broken institutions, the foreign interference, is first and foremost a leadership crisis. You cannot have governance failure without leadership failure preceding it.
Haiti has had no shortage of people in power. What it has had is a profound shortage of leaders. There is a critical difference. Power is obtained. Leadership is earned. Power asks: what can this position do for me? Leadership asks: what does this moment require of me? What Haiti has endured for 40 years is an unbroken succession of individuals who answered the first question while holding the second one hostage.
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Consider what this has looked like in practice. Members of our own Transitional Presidential Council reportedly pocketed $60,000 each in intelligence funds as personal income supplements, in a country where most families survive on less than $3 a day. An accord signed by all stakeholders, the document that was supposed to govern the transition, was quietly abandoned with no consequence and no explanation. The gangs that now control our capital did not emerge from nowhere. They filled the vacuum that compromised leadership created and left unaddressed for years. This is what the absence of accountability looks like when it reaches its logical end.
Effective leadership also demands what I call principled unity. Not the comfortable silence that masquerades as solidarity, but a unity built on non-negotiable shared values. When leaders call for unity, without first defining what they are uniting around, what principles they will protect, what lines they will not cross, they are not building strength. They are building covers. Haiti has been offered too much of that kind of unity. “L’union fait la force” cannot be a slogan. It must be a binding covenant with teeth.
And we must raise the bar for whom we accept as a leader in the first place. Leadership character is not a soft criterion. It is the foundational one. When we accept a candidate who openly degrades women, who has no record of public service, who cannot demonstrate a single principled stand, we are not making a political choice. We are making a moral one. A nation that lowers its leadership standards will always receive leadership that confirms those lowered standards.
Every functioning institution, whether a business, a nonprofit, or a nation, requires three disciplines to survive: accountability, which means answering for your decisions even when it is costly; transparency, which means governing in the open rather than in the shadows; and long-term vision, which means making decisions for the Haiti of 2050, not the election of next year. Remove any one of these three and the structure weakens. Remove all three and you get exactly what we have today.
The Moment That Made Me Cry and Stand Up Straight
In the middle of all this, Haiti’s national football team qualified for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. These young men have not played a home game in years. They trained without a functioning state behind them, without a home crowd, without the childhoods they deserved. And they qualified. They showed up anyway. They prepared anyway. They performed with excellence anyway. In doing so, they modeled exactly the kind of leadership Haiti needs at every level: showing up fully for something larger than yourself, even when every institution that should support you has failed you completely.
If they can carry Haiti’s flag to the world stage without a country behind them, imagine what we could build if we finally gave every Haitian child the country they deserve to come home to.
The Next 40 Years Start With a Decision
Rwanda was a genocide in 1994. By 2026, it is one of Africa’s most stable, fastest-growing economies. People often cite that fact without examining why. The answer is not aid dollars or geography. It is organizational discipline applied to an entire nation. Rwanda’s post-genocide leaders built institutions with genuine accountability structures, prosecuted corruption at every level including within their own parties and consistently made decisions based on a 30-year national vision rather than the next election cycle. They treated governing as a leadership practice, not a power prize. That is the difference. Not resources. Not luck. Decisions.
Haiti does not need a savior from Washington, Paris, or Ottawa. Our independence is not a policy debate. It is the blood of Toussaint, Dessalines, and every soul who chose death over chains. What Haiti needs is a generation of leaders who take that inheritance seriously enough to govern as if they mean it.
That grandmother who danced on February 7, 1986, is gone now. Her grandchildren are still there. Some in the streets, not dancing. Some in the diaspora, carrying a grief without a clean name. Some still in Haiti, holding on with a resilience that shames the rest of us. We owe them more than grief and more than speeches. We owe them leaders who conquer rather than collapse.
We know what went wrong. The question is no longer what happened.
The question is: what are we going to do with what we know?
Nou la pou youn lòt.
But being here for each other means we must stop looking away.
Dr. Darline Wilkenson is a columnist and the host of Saw Dwe Konnen (What You Ought To Know), a trilingual podcast dedicated to community education and empowerment. She serves as the CAO of Haiti On Demand Media Network, a community-based media platform providing coverage for cultural events, with particular focus on serving minority communities. Through #DrDeeSpeaks, she creates inspirational content centered on awareness, advocacy, and action.
Dr. Darline Wilkenson
Entrepreneur - Coach - Writer
Website: wilkensoncoachingacademy.com
Phone number: 678-215-5531
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