Looks like singer Wyclef Jean has managed to land on his feet after his failed presidential run in Haiti. The AP reported yesterday that the singer has accepted an appointment as a visiting fellow in Brown University’s Department of Africana Studies for the 2010-2011 school year.

Jean’s main task at the university will be to help lead its Haiti Initiative, which includes engaging students in lectures, faculty conversations and classes.

According to the AP, Jean says that his time at Brown will be “a period of learning and reflection.”

And it looks like he’ll have plenty to talk about. The Haitian-born singer has been under an intense amount of scrutiny ever since announcing his presidential ambitions over the summer. Those hopes were cut short after a governing body ruled him ineligible to run. It’s largely believed that Jean, who’s spent most of his life in the New York, didn’t meet the government’s constitutional residency requirements.

But the race was also riddled with accusations that the artist simply didn’t understand Haitian politics and culture enough to lead it in the aftermath of January’s devastating earthquake. That disaster killed upwards of 300,000 people, left another 100,000 homeless, and left billions of dollars in structural damage. And when his political IQ wasn’t being called into question, other raised doubts about his professed allegiance with the country’s poor after it was revealed that the singer had backed the coup 2004 coup of popular President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who remains exiled in South Africa.

After battling the country’s election officials to no avail, the singer had previously said he’ll channel his energy into his next album, tentatively titled “If I Were President, The Haitian Experience.”

It’s officially over. Singer Wyclef Jean announced yesterday that he’s ending his bid for Haiti’s presidency after a month-long battle with the country’s election officials who had ruled him ineligible to run.

“Some battles are best fought off the field, and that is where we take this now,” Jean said yesterday, according to CNN. “Our ultimate goal in continuing the appeal was to further the people’s opportunity to freely participate in a free and fair democratic process.”

Jean’s run for office brought international attention to November elections in the country, which is still recovering after January’s devastating earthquake. But the bid wasn’t without controversy. Politically, Jean was opposed to the country’s populist Lavalas movement, whose leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide remains exiled in South Africa after a 2004 coup de tat. Even Jean’s former Fugee bandmate Pras didn’t think the singer was a real leader. And as Ruxandra Guidi reported for ColorLines in a Dispatch from Haiti, many of the young Haitains Jean claimed as his followers don’t see the Brooklyn-raised singer as one of their own.

In the mean time, Jean’s next album, “If I Were President, the Haitian Experience,” is due out in February.

It ain’t over ’till the former-Fugee sings. Wyclef Jean has been told, now for a second time, that he’s ineligible to run for president of Haiti, but he’s not backing down.

Jean recorded and released a new protest song he posted on Twitter called “Prizon Pou KEPA.” The song rails against the Haiti’s electoral council’s refusal to allow the presidential bid. On the track, ‘Clef sings in Creole, a move that’s probably directly linked to claims that the singer wasn’t fluent in the country’s most prominent language. 

Haiti’s electoral committee rejected Jean’s bid based on a requirement that all candidates must establish that they’ve lived in the country continuously for five years. Jean left Haiti as a small child and was raised in Brooklyn, but insists that he’s lived in Haiti for six years.

As Jamilah King reported, the question of residency set aside, Jean’s poor money management and political inexperience guaranteed his road to candidacy was going to get a little bumpy. But despite poor reviews the artist seem unwilling to bow out gracefully.

According to The Guardian, Jean plans to file a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, since the country’s electoral council has already rejected his appeal.

Besides releasing protest songs, Jean may also band with other rejected candidates, including his uncle, Raymond Joseph, Haiti’s former ambassador to the US.

Update @ 1:50p: The Miami Herald reports that Wyclef Jean’s not ready to count himself out of the election. According to Jean, election officials have not in fact ruled him ineligible, as Reuters has reported (see below). Jean told the Herald that he’s got the staunch support of at least three of the eight members of the council that must approve his candidacy. But Herald sources say only the board president:

But sources familiar with the debates of the council have told The Miami Herald that only the president of the council, Gaillot Dorsinvil, has been pushing Jean’s candidacy, despite 20 pages of legal documents submitted as proof that he is not eligible to run. 

Dorsinvil’s staunch support has triggered rumors of possible payoffs. Dorsinvil told The Miami Herald that it is not true” and the rumors are from people trying to destabilize the process. 

Jean denied that he or anyone associated with him have made any payments. 

He also said he had heard three members of the electoral council are trying to get exile because they are being pressured from all sides.”

*****************

Wyclef Jean will not be on the list of approved presidential candidates Haitian election officials are to release today, according to a Reuters news report: 

“He is not on the list as I speak,” said the member of the country’s provisional electoral council, who asked not to be identified. 

He said the electoral disputes bureau entrusted with settling challenges to candidacies had ruled that Jean did not meet several legal requirements, but he gave no details.

Things have not looked good for Jean’s run since the day he triumphantly announced it. Questions immediately surfaced about how the singer’s managed Yéle Haiti, his well known charitable organization. On Monday, the New York Times published a damning piece that summed up the singer’s philanthropic efforts this way: If his leadership of Yéle Haiti–not to mention the state of his own personal finances–is a measure of his qualification to govern, Jean’s presidential bid was over before it began.

Jean, who announced his candidacy earlier this month, had to prove that he’s lived in the country for five consecutive years. If the Reuters report holds true, this requirement was likely Jean’s undoing: He has mostly lived in the U.S. since leaving Haiti as a small child. 

But there’s also the bigger picture: his money is a mess. According to the New York Times, Jean’s fiscal mismanagement includes: the widely reported $350,000 in questionable payments by Yéle to two companies owned by the singer dating back to 2006, $2.1 million in tax liens against a house in New Jersey, and an unfinished Miami mansion lost to foreclosure in 2008.

Perhaps the most damaging allegations surround Yéle’s work on the ground. According to some, it just doesn’t do much, and the work that it does do is short-lived. The organization is headquartered at a $15,000-a-month gated compound and at least four of the nearby camps it claims to support say they’ve yet to receive any food or supplies. “Not even a cookie!” one camp leader told The Times. The foundation did reportedly donate a TV to another camp, but it broke midway through the World Cup.

Though Jean maintains that “culture is part of the youth population in Haiti,” and thus Yéle’s “cultural outreach” is legit, so far it seems like those efforts have mostly been star-studded celebrity events featuring the singer posing for pictures with Angelina Jolie, Akon and Matt Damon. And at least $250,000 of the questionable payments to Wyclef-owned businesses went toward covering the costs of a carnival float, according to sources.

The singer maintains that the though the foundation’s made some missteps, the work is still important. Jean has downplayed the criticisms, calling them hearsay egged on by months of fear and anger by people in camps still devastated by January’s earthquake.

And there’s evidence that Jean still has at least some popular support, though it’s clear that support has more to do with his celebrity than any measurable skill to govern. Proof? “After God is Wyclef,” Jocelyn Augustin, a resident in a camp that’s been aided by Jean’s charity, told the New York Times.

Certainly not everyone in the country is happy about Jean’s desire to run. The singer has reportedly gone into hiding after receiving death threats.

“Wyclef has been repeatedly getting anonymous threats from people who are saying that he should think twice before running for the president. We cannot tell who are sending these threats, but the closer the announcement, the more threats Jean is getting,” his lawyer, Berto Dorce, told CNN.

To make matters worse, the singer was widely expected to run an American-style campaign, led by two American-based PR representatives–Marian Salzman and PJ McCann, who helped lead President Obama’s primary campaign–with no experience in Haitian politics. And so far, Jean’s only done one interview with a major Haitian media outlet.

All this comes as news continues to surface about Haiti’s bold statements against its centuries-long economic bondage to the West. Last week an international group of academics and writers sent an open letter to President Nicholas Sarkozy asking France to repay an 200-year-old “independence debt” estimated to be worth more than $22 billion.

But if the singer is able to get past the eligibility requirements and death threats, his biggest challenge may be reaching out to a population of mostly young people under the age of 21. As Ruxandra Guidi wrote in a recent ColorLines dispatch from Haiti, “when it comes to reinventing and building Haiti, it remains to be seen whether young Haitians will see Jean as one of them.”

So far, it doesn’t look like Jean’s exactly helping his case.

Seems like Wyclef Jean has to come face to face with a slew of critics in the inaugural push for his presidential campaign. From actor Sean Penn to Minister Louis Farrakhan, the high-profile jabs make for some juicy sound-byte material. But there’s also substance, especially when it comes to Wyclef’s past political ties. 

Charlie Hinton wrote a scathing critique in the San Francisco Bay View. Hinton, a member of the Haiti Action Committee, sketched out Jean’s opposition to popular Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was ousted in 2004 and has since remained exiled in South Africa. 

Jean comes from a prominent Haitian family that has virulently opposed Lavalas since the 1990 elections. His uncle is Raymond Joseph – also a rumored presidential candidate – who became Haitian ambassador to the United States under the coup government and remains so today. Kevin Pina writes in “It’s not all about that! Wyclef Jean is fronting in Haiti,” Joseph is “the co-publisher of Haiti Observateur, a right-wing rag that has been an apologist for the killers in the Haitian military going back as far as the brutal coup against Aristide in 1991.
“On Oct. 26 [2004] Haitian police entered the pro-Aristide slum of Fort Nationale and summarily executed 13 young men. Wyclef Jean said nothing. On Oct. 28 the Haitian police executed five young men, babies really, in the pro-Aristide slum of Bel Air. Wyclef said nothing. If Wyclef really wants to be part of Haiti’s political dialogue, he would acknowledge these facts. Unfortunately, Wyclef is fronting.

[snip]

Let us be clear. Jean and his uncle, the Haitian ambassador to the U.S., are both cozy with the self-appointed czar of Haiti, Bill Clinton, whose plans for the Caribbean nation are to make it a neo-colony for a reconstructed tourist industry and a pool of cheap labor for U.S. factories. Wyclef Jean is the perfect front man. The Haitian elite and its U.S./U.N. sponsors are counting on his appeal to the youth to derail the people’s movement for democracy and their call for the return of President Aristide. Most Haitians will not be hoodwinked by the likes of Wyclef Jean.

Clearly, even though Jean has tried to hold on to his Haitian roots by refusing to become an American citizen and routinely brandishing his Haitian Passport, his detractors think he’s way out of touch. 

To make matter worse, poor Wyclef can’t even get former Fugees bandmate Pras to back his presidential bid. In an article on Music Mix Pras explains Jean’s shortcomings:

I love Wyclef to death … We came up together, we grew up together, we basically called each other cousins. But the reality is this, we need a real leader.

Not just a regular leader,” he continued, “but a transformative leader. Someone that’s gonna be able to galvanise the Haitians down on the field, the Haitian-Americans, the international community. It’s a collective support–to take this country to the 21st century. And I’m just not convinced Wyclef is the one for that.

In a less warm and fuzzy critique, Sean Penn who has been living in Haiti off and on since January’s earthquake, had this to say to reporters:

This is somebody who’s going to receive an enormous amount of support from the United States, and I have to say I’m very suspicious of it, simply because he, as an ambassador at large, has been virtually silent. For those of us in Haiti, he has been a non-presence.

The sentiment also extends to the Nation of Islam. Back in late February during the annual Saviors’ Day Convention, Minister Louis Farrkan gave a speech warning Jean to resist becoming mixed up in Haiti’s political process:

…Because when your heart is for your people there are those who have always corrupted the leadership of Haiti. And right now like vultures, they gather around a famous brother because they suspect a future for him back in Haiti and they want to get their claws into the brother so that if he goes back to serve he’ll be their man.

Bottom line: Folks are skeptical of the singer turning his hit song “If I Was President” into reality. 

But we want to toss the question out to our readers. What do you think of Wyclef’s run? Leave it in the comments.