PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The armored SUV makes its way up Avenue John Paul II in Haiti’s teeming capital when Denis O’Brien, the Irish billionaire who built the largest cellphone company here and controls the lion’s share of the Caribbean mobile phone market, leans forward and peers out of the passenger side rear window.
“Everybody is working. All of these people have small stalls,” he says, as vehicles slow to a crawl, whizzing motorcycles cut through traffic and he turns his attention to the myriad of sidewalk vendors off to the side.
“Look at this woman here with the basket on her head, trying to eke out a living,” O’Brien says. “How hard is that? What sort of work is that to do everyday, to fund your family? She might be making a couple of dollars a day too and then you have food inflation and you have people who are probably trying to steal from her. Her own safety, going home wherever she lives.”
Haiti’s largest foreign investor, O’Brien controls 70% of the cellphone market here through his privately held company Digicel Group, which is headquartered in nearby Jamaica. With more than 13.2 million mobile subscribers across 25 markets, mostly in the Caribbean, the company not only revolutionized the mobile-wireless market in Haiti and elsewhere by making devices accessible to everyone, but also the business landscape. Its billboards, “Entrepreneur of the Year” competition and school construction program all challenged the status quo in a country where the private sector usually consists of a few monopolistic Haitian elites, and the company introduced concepts such as marketing and social responsibility.
But after years of riding a wave of chronic political instability, O’Brien, 64, is finding that he can no longer depend on Haiti, his largest market, to generate the kind of revenues that once helped place him on Forbes’ billionaire’s list. Surging gang violence and kidnappings, skyrocketing inflation and a worsening economy have started to take a toll.
In Haiti, the company’s profits are down by more than half; the local currency, the gourde, has depreciated by more than 50%, and rising energy costs for Digicel’s networks across markets, along with its double-digit interest rates, have made servicing its debt near impossible.
“We’re struggling but by God, we’re not suffering like the population,” O’Brien says. “There’s no comparison.”
O’Brien, a towering, silver-haired tycoon who had several businesses before Digicel, has been his company’s main shareholder since putting up its first cell towers in Jamaica in 2001. Now, he may soon have to transfer a controlling stake to creditors after reaching a tentative agreement last week with U.S. bondholders to shave off $1.8 billion in debt. Under the agreement, O’Brien would remain a director and shareholder of Digicel Group, and the company would be on “a sustainable footing post Haiti earnings impact.”
“Obviously, what’s happened here economically, the security situation, our results are very, very poor,” he said as he was still negotiating to restructure the debt. “And that has a knock-on effect in terms of our capabilities to continue to pay high interest rates.”
While Haiti’s operating environment has undoubtedly affected the company’s bottom line, investments and even its network stability, it is not the reason for his overwhelming interest and concerns about the country’s unraveling.
“I’m really committed to finding a way where this country can be properly compensated by the people who created the environment, which has led to where the country is today,” he says. “You can’t have a country that is like Yemen, one hour from the United States. So it means everybody has a role to be working together to find the solution.”
Gangs running amok
Haiti is increasingly on the verge of an abyss. Gangs dictate daily life, controlling major roads in and out of the capital, and even collecting tolls. When not extorting, they are kidnapping, killing and raping victims. The crackling of automatic gunfire, the country’s new soundtrack, is heard as police abandon their posts, substations go up in flames and people become refugees in their own land. Almost half of the nearly 12 million people face acute hunger amid food shortages, higher prices and a deadly cholera outbreak.
The overlapping crises, which existed before the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, have only worsen since his death. Already a volatile landscape of armed gang clashes, Port-au-Prince is now a tinderbox time bomb.
“Everybody is hit with the violence. Everybody wakes up in the morning and thinks about the violence and what could happen to their family, what can happen to their children, what can happen to them on their way to work, what can happen to their livelihood,” O’Brien says. “Nobody can live in Haiti and say, ‘I’m not going to be impacted by this.’”
Unable to go home, some Digicel employees have had no choice but to sleep at its gleaming corporate headquarters in Turgeau. So many have been kidnapped that managers have lost count. At least one, Marie Lydie Duvivier, was killed late last year in a kidnapping attempt.
“She goes to renew her visa at the U.S. Embassy and within the environs of the embassy there’s a kidnapping attempt? How does this happen,” O’Brien says, still shaken by the tragedy.
Food riots, malnourished children, hurricanes, devastating earthquakes, fuel shortages. O’Brien has seen it all since launching here amid another political crisis, this one triggered by the 2004 ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. To enter the Haitian market, he had to team up with a local. So he temporarily went with Gilbert Bigio, the billionaire businessman. Though he eventually bought him out, O’Brien says “they were really good people to be in business with” and he was surprised to see the 88-year-old power broker get sanctioned last year by Canada.
Still breaking into the Haitian market wasn’t easy. The main competitor, Communication Cellulaire d’Haïti, S.A, which was known by its trademark Voilà, had 400,000 customers, was making a fortune and refusing to let Digicel interconnect on its networks. That’s when the first of many clever campaigns were launched.
“I said paint red barrels, like 50 gallons, pour oil and water in them and put a hole in them,” O’Brien recalls. “And we did this campaign: Bring your Voilà phone, drop it into the barrel and we give you a new phone. We got 300,000 customers in five weeks. Voilà was ringing me, saying, ‘Oh, no, we want to interconnect, there’s been a misunderstanding. I said, ‘No, we’re too busy at the moment.’“
Six years later, he bought out the company.
Today, it’s a different landscape. “It is the worst operating environment for any business I’ve ever seen,” O’Brien admits, while sitting in the breezy courtyard of his 175-room Marriott Hotel that he built at the urging of former President Bill Clinton to bring much-needed jobs here after the deadly 2010 earthquake.
Still bullish on Haiti, he says, “it’s in moments of difficulty that you want to invest.”
‘Things have to get worse before they get better’
O’Brien has visited Haiti five times already this year. His most recent visit was last week when he flew in Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness on board his corporate jet. Holness’ trip was part of a long-awaited visit by members of the 15-member Caribbean Community, whom some hope can help mediate the crippling political crisis.
“Rather than me sitting in Jamaica or Ireland and cheering everybody on, on a phone call or Zoom and say, ‘Oh, you’re great,’ you’ve got to come down here and say, ‘How do we solve the problems?’ How do we run the business differently,” says O’Brien, whose majority staff, including his new CEO, are Haitian.
“I have said to people, and this may sound bizarre, ‘Things have to get worse before they get better,’” he says.
Since June 2021, an estimated 100,000 Haitians have been forced to flee their homes by terrorizing gangs. Last week, the numbers grew even more as armed bandits set fire to a local police station and blocked roads in Fort Jacques, a typically peaceful farming community nestled in the tree-lined hills above the capital.
Down the mountain, not far from the international airport, escalating gang violence sent residents of Solino, Delmas 24 and Nazon neighborhoods fleeing with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. Those unable to run, had their homes taken over, the female inhabitants subjected to repeated rape, others killed.
Amid the mayhem, a police commissioner was shot, and two other officers, including a former inspector general, were kidnapped.
“Schools are closing their doors or operate through the internet, commerce is dying, every day women are humiliated and raped, people are killed or kidnapped even inside their homes and are forced to abandon their place of residence,” Dr. William “Bill” Pape, the founder of Gheskio, which treats Haitians infected with the AIDS virus and tuberculosis, said this week in a viral SOS, echoing the deepening despair many have begun to feel.
Pape, who last month temporarily shuttered his downtown clinic after two staffers were kidnapped, said at the current rate, no one will be spared unless the international community decides to help. He called on the U.S, Canada and others to intervene and stop using as “a pretext” Haitians differences on the deployment of an international peacekeeping force as an excuse not to.
“We must put pressure on politicians who prefer to let this country die rather than have an international force while being unable to offer an alternative to this force,” he said. “Their answer is that any international force will come in support of (Prime Minister) Ariel Henry. We have passed this stage. It is about the death of Haiti.”
Gangs “are mapping out a way of life,” says O’Brien, recognizing that the opposition some have to a return of foreign troops on Haitian soil. The United Nations, he says, “lost its credibility when it didn’t fess up to cholera and compensation” for those infected by the deadly virus after it was introduced by Nepalese peacekeepers 10 months after the 2010 quake.
Still, the Haitian national police needs help.
“How do you get your gang members to lay down arms? That’s not going to happen. So that’s where you need a security force,” he says. “It needs to be multinational and I think it should be jointly led by a Haitian and an international person because I think it has to have some credibility in terms of the future path of the state.
“Everybody wants to see a different path for the country,” he says.
Like many with an attachment to Haiti, O’Brien has moments of optimism. He believes a series of roundtable discussions to talk about security and other pressing matters may help break the political logjam. But there are moments of frustration, too.
The European Union and France are not visibly engaged, and should be, he insists. Meanwhile, a recent decision by the Biden administration to allow Haitians to apply for humanitarian parole into the United States if they have a U.S.-based financial sponsor is baffling.
“Although it’s admirable in one sense that the Biden administration is doing something to formalize immigration for the four countries involved in this program, it is absolutely the wrong time for Haiti for this to happen now because just when the country needs as many good people, many trained in education, to really help change the country, they’re all leaving the country,” he says.
Haiti, which already has a weak police force, could lose even more of its officers, he says.
“Already there is a brain drain. If you take high school children going to university, only 2% of them come out with a degree of some sort. So all of them, their aspirations is to move away to America because there are no jobs,” the Ireland-born telecom mogul adds.
O’Brien doesn’t believe Haiti’s problems are insurmountable.
He believes a new constitution is needed because the current one, written after the fall of the nearly 30-year Duvalier family dictatorship, went too far in setting up its checks and balances to prevent another dictatorship from rising.
“I think people now have said, ‘Hey, we’re in a complex territory and if we don’t do this, everybody is impacted by the insecurity at the moment,’” he says. “If you were living here, you probably wouldn’t send your daughter to school for fear that she would either be taken or you now raped. They’ve weaponized gangs.”
If O’Brien is more optimistic than most that Haiti can dig itself out from underneath the centuries old distrust that permeates through society and has prevented leaders from agreeing on a path forward, it’s rooted in his Irish heritage and the experience of Northern Ireland. Catholics and Protestants were at war with each other, and after a decades long bloody guerrilla war that left thousands dead, they signed a treaty on Good Friday in 1998.
That Irish ethos isn’t just visible in O’Brien’s belief in what Haitians can accomplish, but it’s in his DNA when it comes to charitable giving. The company has built 188 schools in Haiti, most of them in far flung communities where none existed.
“Eight years ago, I was with President Clinton and he said to me, ‘Denis, I’ll give you one bit of advice,’“ O’Brien recalls about the former U.S. president who is a friend and with whom he remains engaged on Haiti and Caribbean matters through his Clinton Global Initiative. “You want to build capacity in the country, don’t go around any of the ministries, go through the ministries.”
It was the best advice, says O’Brien, who works through Haiti’s Ministry of Education, and has been lauded for his efforts both in Haiti and beyond.
During the visit to Haiti in mid-February where he checked on Digicel staff, including one who had escaped a kidnapping attempt days earlier, O’Brien paid a visit to the nearby Institution Mixte Notre Dame de l’Assomption. The school’s newest structure, a turquoise and white building, bears the name Colm Delves, the group’s late CEO and O’Brien’s friend and collaborator.
The Montfort Missionaries, a community of priests that runs the school, have requested a new building from Digicel’s charitable arm, Digicel Foundation. Foundation leaders Josefa Gauthier and Sophia Stransky accompanied O’Brien on a visit, along with Digicel Haiti Chairman Maarten Boute. As Stransky, the chief executive officer, pointed out the space, O’Brien, standing in a rocky parking lot, tried to envision where a new building would fit.
“Is there nowhere to put a soccer field?” he asked Stransky as they both approached a group of waiting priests.
Stepping up to one, O’Brien says, “We are going to go ahead with it.”
His next stop is one of the classrooms. As he greets the students, he tells them jokingly in English he was a bad student in math and asks Starnsky, who is begging him not to be a bad role model, to translate for him in Creole.
“We need 10,000 of them in this country,” he later says about the school building.
“We need to keep people in schools longer and educate them and that is to fund education,” he says. “If you look at the commitment of that teacher, she’s probably earning $150 to $200 a month and ... the love in that room, the quality of the education the children are getting, that’s the future but it has to be funded.”
The international community’s foreign aid handouts don’t work, he insists.
“This hand to mouth that Haiti gets is not the way forward,” O’Brien says. “The international community needs to fund education and other projects in this country to transform it. You can’t transform a country without education. That’s the future.”
According to the latest available data, Haitians are spending about 15% to 25% of their household income on education, a steep amount in a country where the average person lives on less than $2 a day.
But right now not even schools are safe and parents are finding that schools are closing or they are forced to keep their children out because facilities are increasingly being targeted by gangs.
“Everything in Haiti can be actually solved if people talk,” O’Brien says. “The difficulty then, if you roll that forward, is the insecurity and the violence.”
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