Militarise them!

October 20, 2004

So, they marched and prayed for peace and for an end to the social divisiveness. They prayed for the 600 plus people who have died by the gun and they asked God to mark that day of prayer, repentance and healing as a "new start" for this country.

Dr Linda Baboolal, acting President of T&T, was quoted by the media as saying the following:

"...Too many of our youths live by the gun. Too many waste their abilities. Too many of our adults are failing to teach our youths values and standards of behaviour or give them guidelines by which to live. Too many of us are not the role models needed for the youths to follow..."

Then, the acting President posed a way forward when she said:

"...there must be programmes to take young men and women off the streets and back into useful and creative use of their God-given talents..."

That was the general tone of all those who spoke at the march organised by the Inter-Religious Organisation on Sunday last and one was left to wonder whether these people, these leaders, have any inkling of how far we have sunk as a society.

The drug trade has taken its toll. This country, for quite some time now, has been a major transshipment point for illicit drugs moving from Latin America to North America, England and even to parts of western Europe.

The guns in the streets emanate from this trade. A whole host of people from various walks of life are involved in the process and the monetary returns are huge. It is said that annually hundreds of millions of dollars circulate as a direct result of this trade.

There is a lifestyle that resonates now from the ghetto culture of the urban and rural hot spots to elites that inhabit Goodwood Park and Westmoorings, a lifestyle that no one gives up easily and which nurtures hard-core criminality.

The people involved are immune to prayer and while we pray for relief, their ravaging of the society continues unabated and their tentacles sink deeper each day. They defend their illicit trade with a ferocious violence that they describe as being "not personal" but "business."

Then, there is the internecine warfare over largesse from the State. The genesis of this can be traced back to the change in government in the period 1995-2001.

Who now was to administrate the social programmes that the State had devised as a safety net and cushion against poverty, particularly as there was clearly evidence that, given the nature of the economy, the rich were getting richer and the poor, poorer?

The new government, as is the norm, brought in their own people at the expense of the former controllers and this set the stage for the intensification of the gang warfare over state contracts in certain hot spots.

This became even bloodier with the arrival of several deportees from North America, who were already well schooled in criminal activity and in the operation and internationalisation of the drug trade.

Again, a hard-core element of criminal activity has crystallised in this regard.

In this very space, some time ago, I made reference to a particular story that I was told by a friend. He had gone to St Babb's to spend a Saturday night with a woman friend, and he was awakened the next morning by the barking of dogs and noises in the street.

He got up and peeped out and saw, to his consternation, six young men walking down the hill, each one armed with a pump-action shotgun.

Imagine that, Winchester pump-action shotguns! That kind of fire-power indicates clearly that what my friend saw in St Babb's is nothing short of a small but effective strike squad.

And we are still talking about praying to change "values!" We need to open our eyes to the realities.

In the very same period of 1995 to 2001, the then government, besides setting the stage for the internecine warfare among the urban poor, also closed down every single programme geared towards training the youth and imparting living skills to them.

They closed every single youth camp in the country, from Chatham to El Dorado. They virtually shut down John Donaldson Institute and San Fernando Technical by not funding them. They stopped the CCC, OJT, etc.

What they conveniently forgot is that these training programmes were geared to take up some of the slack, to suck in students leaving school who were not going to repeat or were not going on to academic tertiary levels.

If the figure is about 15,000 each year, it means that for seven years we are talking about some 105,000 youths, thrown out on the streets to become a captive stratum for the drug trade and the gangs defending turf and bread-and-butter incomes.

This country needs to listen, and listen well. The only solution to our present predicament is conscription to a national service. We have to militarise that element from which the drug lords and gangs recruit. We have to dry up that source.

Every single youth of a particular age, say 18 plus, not involved in an educational/training programme must be conscripted by the State.

Put them in some quasi-military organisation, train them in areas of their choice and, most of all, take them to the shooting ranges and demystify "the gun" once and for all. Wake them up at 4 am and put them to bed at night when they are dog tired.

After three years, you will have produced a disciplined young person with a skill and a different set of values. Trust me!

Prayer will not do it. Prayer helps the already converted.

When a national service was first proposed by Lincoln Myers, there was a howl of protest from certain quarters. The Hindus said that it was against their religion. Well, we do not wish to go against anybody's religion, so Hindus can be left out of the national service.

The point is that if we had had the vision to take Lincoln Myers seriously, there would be no such present predicament.