There is a name for the quiet theft that cloaks itself in policy briefs and board meetings, in grants and glossy reports. Economists call it rent-seeking—the art of accumulating wealth without building anything, the choreography of power that extracts value while offering little in return. It is the ghost that haunts systems already cracked by history.
In Haiti, rent-seeking is not theoretical. It is real, lived, and layered. You see it in the non-profit sector, where foreign aid—intended to be salvation—too often bloats administrative salaries, funds air-conditioned SUVs, and disappears into consulting contracts. The people—those whose names are used to raise the money—see little of it. In this way, suffering becomes currency. The poor are reduced to symbols in PowerPoint decks, while the structure around them grows fat and immovable.
You see it, too, in the business elite, where a tight circle of oligarchs controls nearly 80% of Haiti’s marketed food supply. These are not merchants of innovation, but gatekeepers of scarcity. They manipulate prices not to serve, but to secure profit, to tighten their grip on a desperate public. It is a stranglehold disguised as supply.
And perhaps most corrosively, you see it in the political sphere, where influence is not earned but bought. Reports of presidential council members requesting $750,000 to secure their positions reveal what happens when politics becomes a marketplace—when leadership is auctioned to the highest bidder and governance becomes a private hustle. These are not just numbers. They are acts of violence against hope.
Rent-seeking, then, is not only an economic behavior. It is a moral stance—a posture of indifference toward the people. It is the refusal to build, the refusal to serve, the refusal to be accountable. And in a country like Haiti, already buckling under centuries of extraction, it is a wound layered atop older wounds.
To name it is not enough. But to name it clearly, without flinching, is the beginning of another kind of possibility.
