By Junior Legrand, Ayibopost, April 6, 2025
According to interviews conducted by AyiboPost with people involved in the community initiative, the Ouanaminthe Canal has reformed its committee, a key step towards relaunching work on the Maribahoux plain in Ouanaminthe.
The committee's new structure took shape at an extraordinary general meeting held on Tuesday, March 25, 2025.
Two high-profile members of the committee of the "Kanal la Pap Kanpe" movement, President Moïse Joseph and Treasurer Gaston Etienne, were excluded from this meeting, which was attended by around thirty figures involved in the KPK movement.
A good portion of the dozen committee members were present at the meeting, which took place in the absence of Joseph and Etienne.
The latter had already ignored the last meeting, held on Monday, October 7 of the previous year—the first held after six months of inactivity. This meeting had resulted in the creation of a mediation commission to resolve the disputes that were eating away at the structure.
According to Guillaume Josaphat, an influential member of the committee and one of the two spokespeople, "the mediation commission failed to bring the recalcitrant members back to the discussion table because of their intransigence."
Mackendy Josaphat and Antoine Claude, two important figures who participated in the launch of the KPK project, were appointed respectively as the new president and treasurer of the committee.
Two committees, composed of five and seven members, were created at this last general meeting. They are responsible, respectively, for ensuring the logistics of future canal works and for harmonizing the relations and actions of the committee members with the farmers of the Maribahoux plain.
For Guillaume Josaphat, this is an "important step in strengthening agricultural recovery. We must continue, because we have a mission to the country."
Construction of the Ouanaminthe Canal on the Massacre River began under the late president Jovenel Moïse. Located on the edge of the Haitian-Dominican border, the project aims to bring water to irrigate 3,000 hectares of land in the Maribahoux Plain.
This work, whose construction, halted after Moïse's death, was resumed by the population, has sparked one of the most significant outpourings of solidarity from Haitians, both within the country and within the diaspora, since the 2010 earthquake.
But internal dissensions within the management committee hampered the completion of the work, according to an AyiboPost investigation dated October 21, 2024.
Several engineers involved in the work told AyiboPost that the canal could disappear if certain essential infrastructures were not built.
For example, the canal requires sedimentation basins for the evacuation of alluvium, a retention canal to store and measure the flow of water, a flushing basin, as well as secondary and tertiary canals to ensure equitable irrigation of the plantations in the plain.
Gabion work upstream and downstream of the canal remains one of the most critical infrastructure projects to be completed. Neglecting this could lead to cracks and the masonry dislodging during heavy flooding during the rainy season.
Following the AyiboPost article, work on the construction of a retention or distribution basin began in December 2024 on the canal site.
In October 2024, the committee members obtained funding of 80,000 US dollars, or just over ten million gourdes, from the World Food Programme (WFP).
According to the current chairman of the canal committee, Mackendy Josaphat, this money was deposited into the KPK account, then managed by Moïse Joseph and Gaston Etienne.
Following the irregular spending scandal revealed by AyiboPost last year, "the committee members established a memorandum of understanding setting out the terms for disbursing the funds collected for the construction of the retention basin," Josaphat told AyiboPost.
Article 5 of this protocol made the joint signature of the president or treasurer with that of the secretary Rosine Charles mandatory.
But, according to Josaphat, disbursements were made by Pastor Moïse Joseph and Gaston Etienne without Charles's signature, in violation of protocol.
According to him, "this is one of the reasons that led us to reshuffle the committee on March 25."
Pastor Moïse Joseph was contacted by AyiboPost on April 4. He did not respond to the allegations raised by members of the former committee. In a few words, he stated that he had no "time to devote to schemes fabricated by little vagrants."
The WFP-funded retention basin works were supervised and implemented by a subcontracting firm called “SIKSE” and executed by three KPK engineers, according to a confidential report covering the first phase of the works from December 10, 2024 to February 11, 2025, obtained exclusively by AyiboPost.
The report states that the work included, among other things, the widening of the river and the construction of two retaining walls on the right and left banks of the canal.
Ten million gourdes were disbursed by the relevant members of the committee for the completion of this work.
Pastor Moïse Joseph, now former chairman of the committee and one of the direct beneficiaries of the expenses incurred for the initial works of the canal through "the sale of his services" through his construction company, also provided materials for the distribution canal to the tune of 1,695,000 gourdes.
An AyiboPost investigation in 2024—which had already identified Moïse Joseph as one of the main suppliers—raised questions about a possible conflict of interest.
According to the document obtained by AyiboPost, a lack of resources hampered the second phase of work on the distribution channel, which involved the completion of certain concrete structures, such as a dam and a transverse cut-off.
Materials may be in stock, but the Committee lacks the funds to pay the workers. The document mentions a debt of 291,000 gourdes owed to the construction site workers.
Funding problems are also recurring. Pastor Moïse Joseph complained to AyiboPost in 2024 about the initiative's insufficient funds to ensure the completion of the work.
Haitian and foreign contributors have contributed nearly one million US dollars and 43 million gourdes for the Ouanaminthe Canal.
But despite the upheavals within the Ouanaminthe Canal's management committee, the new president Mackendy Josaphat remains optimistic: "We must work to meet citizens' expectations regarding the Ouanaminthe Canal," he emphasizes.
Translated by CHIP editors
Posted April 12, 2025