by Wyclef Jean
In the end, the media didn’t find anything wrong with our tax situation because there was nothing wrong with it. We were behind on our payments for a few years before the earthquake. We were a small charity and that’s how things go in the beginning stages, but suddenly, once we had managed to raise so much money so quickly, we drew their attention. We were expected to run our organization like we’d been together for years and had always run the show in Haiti—in the midst of the biggest national natural disaster the country had ever seen. It is true; we had a few outstanding financial issues to deal with, but our accountants took care of them right away. We laid our books open to every news source that wanted to see them. CNN investigated us thoroughly a month later and admitted that they found nothing wrong.
The way media works today, however, is that the first story is the one people remember most, and a lot of the time, when it’s all cleared up, they’ve moved on to another topic. Our news journalists deliver bits of sensation but never stay with a story long enough to follow it through to the end. And that’s what happened to Yéle’s mission. Less than a month later, there was an earthquake in Papua, New Guinea, and the focus of the news and the world shifted there before they got the chance to hear the whole truth of our story. Much of America will only remember that Yéle stole the money it raised, and that Wyclef doesn’t pay his taxes. My father always told me to face things honestly and that is what I do. Honesty always prevails, he said, because honesty is what separates men from giants.
From the start, I came clean about the mistakes we had made. I was accused of accepting a $100,000 payday for a benefit concert, funneling $250,000 to a media company of mine, and paying $31,000 in rent to my studio, Platinum Sounds. Why would I do any of this? I have a watch collection worth $500,000. I would never need to take the money from my own charity to cover operating costs like that. The truth is that Yéle has real influence: we raised 1 million dollars in twenty-four hours and I think the show of unity we inspired made powerful people uncomfortable, which led to unfair scrutiny. There was only one thing to do, which was to keep going hard, to disprove these shady allegations over time.
The truth will prevail, and even those who still doubt us will see that Yéle is Haiti’s greatest ally and asset. We serve to rebuild, to empower, and to educate. Since our start we have been doing work that will continue beyond the earthquake relief. We’ve been putting kids through school, starting with the 3,600 scholarships we provided to children in Gonaïves following the devastation of Hurricane Jeanne in 2005, our first year in operation. In our second year of operation we doubled our number of scholarships and spread the wealth throughout Haiti and we’ve been growing ever since. Yéle is in Haiti to stay, just as my heart and all of my efforts as a man and artist will be focused there for the rest of my days.
Haiti was the first black republic in the world and having that heritage in my blood has allowed me to become a successful artist and entrepreneur in the United States and in the rest of the world. How could I not do everything in my power to repay my roots?
I RETURNED FROM HAITI after several visits in the wake of the earthquake as an entirely different Clef. It was as if every trip there confirmed something that had always been in me, but that I had not recognized until then. Down there amid the suffering I became part of the effort from the ground up, and realized that my family came first and my home country came next. People think I decided to become a statesman overnight, but the decision wasn’t spontaneous. It was the end of a journey, as it was also the beginning of one—one that started the day my father passed away. That moment was my first awakening. I realized that I should be doing more with my life than music. My father gave all of himself to others, and I realized that I should do what I can to be as useful as he had been.
And so I began to think of the coming election in Haiti. There was much that I could do through Yéle, but there would be even more I could do in office. I could turn the types of institutional programs that bring education, food, and water to the country’s neediest regions into national institutions. Yéle had a successful infrastructure and I wanted to re-create it within the government to whatever extent possible.
I had some more work to do on my public image first, because damage had been done. The main allegation that came up during the tax issue centered on Telemax, a television production company in Haiti that I own with Jerry Duplessis. Yéle paid Telemax to create television ads for the organization in order to spread awareness of our programs. Some saw this as my foundation paying me directly via a company in which I own a majority share. Technically this is what happened, but to think that Telemax profited from the ads is ridiculous. Yéle money was used, but it was the bare minimum of what was needed to cover the operating costs of creating and running the ads. Let me put it this way: a company may decide to give a vendor a deal on its rates, but that doesn’t mean that the company’s employees agree to a wage cut for that week. These mathematics were not accounted for in the media reports. The discount Telemax gave Yéle covered the operating costs, but there was no profit whatsoever. Some people saw this as a conflict of interest, and while that may make sense in the first world, that doesn’t apply in someplace like Haiti. It comes down to this: Telemax is the best, most organized television production company in the country, so there was nothing wrong with employing them to make the best advertisements possible. It was a guarantee that Yéle would get the best work for its money. I’m an entrepreneur, so if I own a television production company, and the best ads will be made there for the cheapest budget possible, that’s what I’m going to do.
After all of the negative attention from the national press, accusing me of living high off of Yéle money and using the charity of others to funnel profits into my other companies, I decided that the only way to keep this from ever happening again was to go above and beyond what other charities, nonprofit organizations, and nongovernmental organizations do to allow donors to follow the trail of their contributions. We undertook a full restructuring of Yéle Haiti and made our work entirely transparent. It’s right there on our website, so that anyone who is interested can see how we are set up to provide aid from start to finish. I invite the world’s curiosity.
We now have a bigger board of executives and we employ one of the most respected accounting firms in the world to oversee our books and control the money. All of the funds we raise—from individuals, governments, or private companies—are held by that accounting firm until the proposals for the various Yéle projects are approved by the board of directors. Once a project is approved and the budget is put into place, the money goes from the accounting firm to the committee in charge of the program. Yéle may have grown too fast and made some mistakes, but we have made changes to improve our operating procedures and they are there for all to see.
I own eight businesses in Haiti, because I’m trying to lead by example in the eyes of the international business community. I want global investors to see that profitable, stable businesses can exist in my homeland. The only way for Haiti to enter the modern age is for foreign capital to become a permanent part of our business infrastructure. Many celebrities have charities, but not every celebrity charity is a nongovernmental organization. Declaring yourself an NGO means you are stating that you want to handle the types of internal responsibilities to the people that the government usually takes care of. That is my goal with Yéle: to provide what the government cannot, until the government can. And as a celebrity, I intend to lobby on behalf of Haiti everywhere I go.
My vision with Yéle was simple when I started it, and even now with so many challenges ahead of us it remains the same: to bring civilization to Haiti’s most rural areas by providing education, creating jobs, and convincing kids to trade their guns for work that will provide a future for their nation. The foundation came from my brain and contains my soul. I spent the years before the earthquake making influential people like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and Matt Damon aware of Yéle, and I got them all to come d
own and see our scholarships in action. We were providing close to seven thousand scholarships to send kids to schools and universities. It was basic education, that cost us about a hundred US dollars per kid, and we funded much of it through Voilà and our partner company, Comcel (both cellular phone corporations that have since merged). My belief was always that teaching kids to read and write wasn’t enough. To have a self-sufficient nation, they needed higher education, too, and those who were too old to start classroom learning needed vocational training. Think about it: if a kid is nineteen, he doesn’t want to head back into a classroom, but he may respond to learning a trade, something practical that can provide him a living and a new life. These are not bad things in any country at any time.
We put all of these things into effect on our own, but unfortunately we were still virtually an underground movement until the earthquake, and the fallout from the tax misunderstanding put us on the map, in the wrong way, in the eyes of America. I regret that when we hit the big screen and got our mainstream exposure it was for that reason, but you know what they say: bad news travels quicker than good news. I’d raised money for Haiti before, after the floods in Gonaïves, and I’d been providing education to Haitian children for almost ten years, but that didn’t matter to the public, at least at first. I stayed strong during that time, and I remembered what my father once told me: “When you are being tried, and the eyes of the world are upon you, never use your color, you blackness as an excuse.” I stayed strong because I knew in my heart something else he told me: “If your hand is clean you have absolutely nothing to worry about.”
IN THE FIRST FEW weeks after I returned from the devastation, I went to a few meetings at the White House to speak to one of Obama’s political strategists about how to most effectively get aid into the country and save lives. I also spoke to members of the Black Caucus, because I was a firsthand witness at that point, and they wanted to know the real deal of what it was like on the ground. I told them all of Yéle’s plans to rebuild and what kind of resources we had—and what we needed. I told them about my larger plans to get the country up and running again and how I wanted to devote myself to educating the international community about the culture and the needs of Haiti.
I got a call from George Clooney around this time, which was really cool. He had an idea for a show to raise money and he said he couldn’t do it without me. So we started to put together the concert for Haitian relief. Every good thing you’ve ever heard about George Clooney is true: he is a man of his word and a man with a real strong character. He wasn’t an actor producing a self-named telethon; he was someone who wanted to come out and do his part. He was a part of every e-mail and phone call that I got from that point. He was such a good manager and event producer that I kept asking him if he had a day job we could replace.
Around that same time I got a call from Oprah, whom I’d always wanted to talk to. I mean she’s Oprah Winfrey. That woman has achieved so much in her life, she should be an inspiration to everyone, no matter who they are. She and I stayed on the phone for an hour or more, talking about the conditions in Haiti and the best way for her to help out. I’d wanted to be on the Oprah show my entire life. Oprah is special; even speaking to her on the phone you can feel her warmth. She is one of those people who is truly tuned in to the world and she has a light about her, this natural light that people gravitate toward. She didn’t want to go to Haiti for the photo op; put it that way. She wanted to do real work.
“Clef. Call me whenever. I mean it.” She don’t say that to just anybody, right?
Oprah pours herself into what she does, and that’s how I’d approached Yéle. I remember meeting Harry Belafonte in 2004, the year before I founded Yéle. He told me to read an amazing book called Pillar of Fire by Judith Tarr, which is a historical novel based in Egypt that explores the idea that Moses and the pharaoh Akhenaten were the same man. He said it would teach me about what it means to be a leader. Harry is a wise, serious man, so when he looked me in the eye I listened to everything he had to say.
“How deep are you willing to go in? That’s the only question you need to ask yourself,” he said.
“I want to go in. All the way.”
“Do you? Be sure that you do. Because once you take that step, you must not turn back.”
“I will not turn back.”
I went in deep from the start. Within the first two years of running Yéle, I found myself in situations that other men might not have walked out of alive. When I think about them, I’m still not sure how I did it. My only explanation is that the spirits who watched over my father all those times he walked through the ’hood in Coney Island untouched were now there watching over me.
The most dangerous position in which I found myself was acting as mediator between two gangs in Cité Soleil—one of the worst, most violent slums in all of Haiti—in 2005. I was on tour in Paris at the time when someone in my circle handed me a phone.
“Clef, somebody named 2Pac wants to talk to you,” he said.
“What the hell you talkin’ about? 2Pac is dead!”
“I know, I know. This guy says he knows you. He says he’s the Haitian 2Pac and that it’s important. He says he’s got to talk to you.”
I had no idea what this was going to be about, but like I told Harry Belafonte, I was ready to go in.
“This is Clef,” I said into the phone.
“This is Clef?” he said. I could tell he was a just a teenager.
“Yeah it’s me. What’s going on, young brother?”
“Clef, we’re in Cité Soleil, we have over five thousand guns, and we have a standoff. We want to put down our guns, but we need someone to come talk to us and the only person who can do that is you. We listen to your music, and remember you said in your song, ‘The guys from Cité Soleil are not scared of anything.’ That’s truth. We’re really not.”
“I believe you.”
“We need you to come talk to us, Clef, because we don’t want to fight, but we feel like if we don’t, the other gang’s gonna kill us. I know they’d kill us. We want peace; we got people starving in here because we’re all fighting every day.”
“Be strong, young brother. When I get off the road I’ll come down and talk to you.”
It was an urgent situation: the gangs were controlling the food and water supply, and their fighting was keeping innocent citizens from receiving any aid being bussed in by organizations like Yéle and the Red Cross. This was right after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide lost power, so the infrastructure had fallen apart, and in regions like Cité Soleil, chaos ruled the day. It’s too bad his regime fell apart. I felt like his rule was a moment of hope for Haiti, because his plans for the future were progressive.
People were starving and I was the one to put an end to it, so I went to Cité Soleil with just two friends and a backpack. There was constant gunfire every day, tires and garbage burning in the streets, and fear in the air. You can see it all in the documentary The Ghosts of Cité Soleil. It was a human hell on earth.
I walked into Cité Soleil with my father’s spirit inside me and so I was unafraid. I went in and slowly people started to follow us; the further I went, the more people joined the crowd like I was some kind of Pied Piper. By the time I thought to turn around, it looked like a crowd of ten thousand were behind me. They were chanting and singing my songs and moving as a huge mob. The leader of the gang, a guy higher up in rank than Haitian 2Pac, came to me then. His name was Labayne. We left the crowd behind us and went inside a building to talk.
Lebayne was a hard gangster with a nasal voice who talked with a distinctive twang. “Do you know my favorite song?” he asked me. And then he started to sing a few lines from “Sang Fézi” off my album The Carnival.
Ki ayisien kap di’m map mache New-York san fezi
Mwen di ou messie nou menti
L bum yo ginbe ou yo devore ou se l ou mouri police vini.
In English that means: “Which Haitian is going to tell me to walk
to New York City with no gun? / You’re lying because the police show up after the thugs are done robbing me.” He said he listened to it every night before he went to sleep.
“I wrote that song about people stealing my sneakers back when I was a teenager. I’m sure it means something different to you.”
It’s hard for me to think of something everyone has seen that compares to what Cité Soleil was like. What comes to mind are pictures of Somalia, Baghdad, and maybe North Korea; in all those places, the news outlets printed pictures where every kid fifteen or older had a gun, and they were all out in force. That’s what this place was like, at least until we got there.
“You’re not scared?” Lebayne said. “Because millionaires don’t come down here to talk.”
“Well it’s a good thing I’m not a millionaire,” I said. “I’m a revolutionary, and that’s why I’m here.”
He gave me a good long stare and then he burst out laughing, and as he continued to laugh I heard rounds of ammunition going off, over and over, outside.
“My friend,” I said, “I am here to talk to you because we need to bring peace to this place. People are starving and only you can stop this. At the end of the day the future of the country depends on what happens here.”
At that moment Haitian 2Pac came up to me. I gave him a hug.
“Clef, thank you,” he said. “Only you could do this. After we’re done here, we’ve got some music for you to listen to.” He was just like kids in the States; he saw a chance and he was right there with his demo tape. He wanted to put his guns down and try to keep the peace with us rappers over here; we’re people who have the privilege of not facing life-or-death moments every minute of every day.
I had made my way in, but I had to get this side talking to the other side, because making friends with one wasn’t going to solve a thing if the others didn’t come to the table—and I had to make that happen by charm and force of will. Just like gangs in the States and around the world, all of those kids threw signs with their hands. They were different from East Coast–West Coast shit, but it was all the same language.
