CANNES — Wyclef Jean was disappointed when he was told he couldn’t run for president of Haiti, but that didn’t stop him from continuing his efforts to make a difference in other ways.
The Haitian-American rapper, 49, said at the Cannes Lions festival that he became interested in politics because of his uncle’s book, “For Whom the Dogs Spy.”
“At a very young age, politics in Haiti has always been in the back of my mind, and I knew 80 percent of a population is living on less than a dollar a day. They talk about me running [for president] but five years from that I was at the Congress — there were a few bills that I got passed for my country,” said Jean, who spoke on Monday at the “Facts, Fads and a Fugee” panel alongside Philip Morris International’s Vice President of Scientific and Public Communications Moira Gilchrist.
One bill was the Hope Bill, which dealt with textiles.
“I’m all about job creation,” he said. “That’s my whole thing within my country.”
Jean ultimately decided to run for president in 2010 after the earthquake “250,000 people was under the rubble.”
Election officials ultimately disqualified him from the race, but he knows he still had an impact.
“What I did in Haiti, it has galvanized the youth around the entire world because sometimes our job is not to get there,” he shared, “but our job is to inspire the next generation to get there.”
He joked that none of his friends took his bid for the presidency seriously and acknowledged that many people don’t think celebrities are intelligent.
“I need people to understand that rappers have brains,” he said. “I really don’t think they understand how smarts celebrities are. Not all of them, you know, but a lot of them.”
He later continued, “I really can hear when I called up some of my rap friends and I was like, ‘Yo, you know I’m going to run for president of Haiti.’ I could hear them go, ‘This n—a crazy.'”
Jean ended his talk with a live performance of “If I Was President” and “Maria Maria” and quipped there was no sound check, so if it “sounded like s–t” don’t blame him.