Moise wants to lift Haiti fortunes with farming

The man who appears to have won the first round of Haiti’s presidential election, Jovenel Moise, says he wants to lift the Caribbean country out of poverty by reviving its agricultural sector.Moise, a 48-year-old political novice and entrepreneur who worked in agriculture mostly growing bananas, has been nicknamed “banana man” since former president Michel Martelly chose him to represent the PHTK party.“We will need to mobilise all the resources of the country, as I repeated during my campaign: men, land, sun and rivers to put food on people’s plates and money in their pockets,” Moise said shortly after the preliminary results of the first-round election were announced.The preliminary results showed that Moise won the election outright, garnering 55.7% of the vote, but he lacks much popularity, with only 21% of eligible voters casting their ballots.A candidate who wins more than half of the ballots cast in the first round is the victor, preventing the election from going to a second round.Jude Celestin, who ran as a candidate of the opposition LAPEH and came in second with 19.52%, has joined fellow candidates Moise Jean-Charles (11.04%) and Maryse Narcisse (8.99%) in challenging the outcome.“We are saying there was cheating and we will see who cheated,” Celestin said without naming Moise directly.Violence broke out on Tuesday in some of Port-au-Prince’s poorest neighbourhoods, which were carried out by Narcisse’s Fanmi Lavalas party.Police launched teargas grenades to disperse a crowd of hundreds of her supporters who called the vote an “electoral coup” and reacted to the advancing officers by throwing stones.“We didn’t vote in secret. All of the working-class neighbourhoods in the country...voted for Maryse, but the results they announced were an electoral coup,” said Rose-Marie Rosilus, who lives in Bel Air, a neighbourhood that has historically been a bastion of former leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who heads the Lavalas party.“We will stay out in the streets until the electoral council gives us our true results,” added Rosilus, who brought lemons to alleviate the effect of the teargas.Provisional Electoral Council president Leopold Berlanger cautioned that the results were preliminary and final results would not be confirmed until December 29.Haitian law offers candidates the opportunity to challenge the results in electoral courts. The drawn-out proceedings are slowing down the return to constitutional order in a desperately poor country already beset by political upheaval.Three of the council’s nine members refused to sign the results announced on Monday, signalling a potential conflict over the outcome.