Citizens are doing it for themselves
In Haiti’s citywithoutagovernment, residents are clamouring to be taxed. Jacob Kushner, of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, reports from Canaan.
ON a street of rocks and white dust in the centre of one of the world’s newest cities, Alisma Robert pointed to an array of electric cabling strung between rickety wooden poles.
‘‘It wasn’t EDH that built that pole,’’ said Robert, referring to Haiti’s national electricity provider.
‘‘It was us.’’
Nearly everything in the city of Canaan, which was founded in 2010 after a catastrophic earthquake, was built by residents without government help.
After waiting two years for electricity, Robert and his neighbours collected money from each household, erected the wooden poles, and wired up the cables to the house of a family who were connected to the grid.
‘‘I’m a citizen — but not for the moment. I don’t have the benefits of a citizen. We don’t have drinkable water . . . no public toilets. The government doesn’t do anything for the people who live here.’’
Nearby, his wife sat at a rickety table selling bread and bags of sugar. Few people came to buy.
‘‘I don’t have work,’’ the 52yearold former teacher said.
Nine years on
Robert lost his job nine years ago when the earthquake destroyed the elementary school where he worked. The 7.0magnitude quake that hit on January 12, 2010 levelled much of the capital, PortauPrince, and left 1.5 million Haitians homeless.
Estimates of the number of people killed vary widely, from 46,000 to as many as 316,000.
In the aftermath, international agencies helped relocate some homeless families to empty land 16km north of the capital. Others flocked there, and within months thousands had claimed plots.
At first, most lived in shacks or under tarpaulins, but eventually many laid concrete blocks for the foundations of their future homes and businesses. They planted fruit trees and grazed goats.
Called Canaan, it has grown from a population near zero to about 300,000.
A few months after the earthquake, then president Rene Preval expropriated the land for the state. To date, though, the state has not identified the previous owners or compensated them. Since the expropriation, several businesses and individuals have claimed they were the rightful owners.
The law requires that the state identify the owners and pay compensation if necessary,
Leslie Voltaire, a Haitian architect and urban planner, said. However, he believes the land does now belong to the state, so it ‘‘should be able to do a cadaster there and give land title’’. That has not happened.
The ministry responsible declined a request for an ontherecord interview to discuss the land titling issue in Canaan.
The spokesman for the office of the president did not respond to an interview request.
‘Delicate situation’
Without title, residents risk losing any investment they make and cannot use their property as collateral.
‘‘After I have my document, I can invest here,’’ Robert said. ‘‘I could do anything I want — sell food, sell phone credit. Start a hardware store. But noone is legalised here.’’
The head of the postearthquake reconstruction office, Clement Belizaire, warned that without security of tenure, this largely selfgoverned city could become a slum where land barons filled the void.
‘‘This is a very delicate situation where the government has not yet compensated or officially identified owners. There’s a lot that needs to be put in order to make this viable,’’ he said.
The first requirement would be identifying plots and giving residents the chance to register them, he said. After that, the state could levy taxes, which residents say they want to pay because that would obligate the state to provide services — and, above all, security.
Tax and spend
The need for tax revenues led the American Red Cross to fund an assessment in 2017 and 2018 of about a quarter of the estimated 40,000 homes and shops in Canaan. It handed that data to the government so nearby municipalities could levy taxes and invest that revenue in community projects.
Yet it remains to be seen whether municipal authorities will allocate money from their budgets to survey the rest of Canaan’s structures, although a representative from the nearby city of CroixdesBouquets said it had begun doing so.
One solution to the land dispute would be for the original landowners to seek payment from residents, with the government acting as a broker, Louis Jadotte, a former UNHabitat consultant in Canaan, said, although establishing ownership in a 300,000strong city would be a huge undertaking.
But recognising people’s properties in order to tax them is not the same as granting permanent deeds that would legally secure their tenure, Jadotte said.
Taxrelated documents might just state that the municipality recognised the person was ‘‘occupying’’ that place and was ‘‘paying their fair share in the form of government taxes or fees’’, he said. Its residents might still be seen as illegal squatters in the government’s eyes until it decided to address the underlying issue of ownership.
‘‘Land rights are not a black and white thing — it’s a continuum. And you can move it from uncertainty toward security, papers that say you’re the full owner.’’
No more space
The land underneath Canaan was once slated for development as an industrial park to manufacture and export goods, but that did not happen.
Today it is home to hundreds of thousands of people. More still come seeking land, Robert said of his neighbourhood, Canaan 3.
‘‘But they don’t find — there is no more space.’’
‘‘Canaan cannot become a desert,’’ he said, in reference to the state’s lack of involvement.
‘‘The history of the people of Israel — Moses led them through the desert. He took them out of slavery,’’ he said.
‘‘It’s the same for me — it’s from slavery that I left,’’ he said, referring to landlords to whom he was indebted in PortauPrince before the earthquake.
And so, come what may, Robert is determined he will not go back to the capital. Instead, he plans to live out his days in Canaan, waiting for the government to give him the security of tenure that he says the people of this new city deserve.
❛ After I have my document, I can invest here. I could do anything I want . . . But noone is legalised here