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This week, we witnessed the funeral of Ezekiel Paria, who was shot while riding a bicycle in his village. It was tragic. His dreams and his mother’s hopes were snuffed out through indiscriminate shooting on a main road.
But have we thought for a moment about the young woman, 15 years old, who was sitting in the car which was sprayed with bullets by the same assailants?
She survived, or so we would like to think. Not a word about her and what she now has to undergo. Her life is now one of hiding and hoping to outfox the shooters who came for her father, who is reported as being 39-years-old.
Can we think about this for a moment? That your daughter, who will be in secondary school, will not be able to move freely? That you, at age 37, have a death threat hanging over your head?
How did the father get into this space? The sadness is that the guys who shot may have attended the same school as he did. Where will it end?
Let us not believe that the indiscriminate shooting of Ezekiel is unprecedented. It is not.
Remember De Neilson Smith and Mark Richards, the two Success Laventille Secondary School students who were murdered within an hour of leaving school?
Gunmen took them out of the vehicle and mockingly killed them. That was in late January 2016.
But do we recall that on New Year’s Day that year, a 6-year-old child, Jodel Ramnath, and a 69-year-old woman, Alvina Warner, were shot and died while the fireworks exploded?
What about the need to close the Our Lady of Laventille Roman Catholic Primary School because of gunmen running through the schoolyard on successive days?
Photo: Ministry of National Security
That was six years before a similar incident at Rose Hill RC Primary School forced residents to describe the gangs as having passed “the threshold of “decency” and had begun to “lose all reason, and turn to brutish deeds”.
All these murders remain unsolved. We could go back to May 2014, when nine-year-old Jadel Holder and his brother, Jamal Brathwaite, 15 years old, were murdered in their home.
The newspaper reports indicated that their mother was present. She worked from Sunday to Sunday at a supermarket along the Eastern Main Road to provide for them. While she was working, the boys were turning into terrors. Death came for them.
Was she less than a good mother? How do we determine that?
What about Netanya Mohamdally? Do you remember her? I guess not.
Her mother fought and stuck with her after she was raped in 2015 at the age of 12 by a 24-year-old man. The court system failed her, but she still got her CXC passes. Then, she was murdered and left in a ravine.
What more can a mother do? Poverty is hell, even when you live in Central.
Her hands and feet were tied together with rope, her head was bashed in and an autopsy revealed she died of chop wounds to the neck. She was 17.
What is our reaction? Instinctively, some of us will politicise this issue of dying youths. That is an easy wash your hand approach. Vote us, and things will change.
Some will accuse the slain of being in some immoral act, and justice was meted out. Others will blame the community for harbouring criminals.
A popular opinion may be that those crime-ridden places are not our responsibility. We only need the labour from those neighbourhoods. Please do not ask us to be accountable for any of the ills present.
But let us be aware that if and when the country becomes ungovernable or we mash up the place, it affects everyone. The whole ship will sink. There will be no partially submerged vessel with the bow out of the water! Forget that.
The words of Wendell Manwarren about the demise of J’ouvert ring true. We have made choices and now must deal with the consequences.
When you focus on yourself and the elitist position, you rob yourself and the country. Your greed is not beneficial to you. The Jamaican business class learnt that harsh lesson.
They flew to Fort Lauderdale and elsewhere in Miami and are back in Kingston. Now, they are desiring to pick up businesses here. What a life!
We choose not to behave as though boys in Laventille (and other poor areas) matter while visibly signalling what is valuable in our society. We have commercialised everything we could. We have discarded all who cannot defend themselves. We are living in a time of profound moral failure.
With the bitterness that marks our political discourse and the divisive bile that stains our interactions, who will care about fixing what will be a sore that will fester endlessly?
(via CNC3)
The people of East Port of Spain and other deprived areas have no money to sway the policymakers. No articulate spokesperson has arisen since Makandal Daaga to plead their cause. We have no writers who will ask the right questions.
Instead, we have charlatans who disrespectfully live lives of glamour on their backs. They milk the pride of the community for selfish ends. They pontificate with high-sounding words like clouds and winds that bear no rain.
What are the conditions that mark this quagmire? The children in Laventille and other economically deprived areas are growing up in dire poverty, not having sufficient income to meet their needs for food, clothing and housing.
(Copyright Johanne Rahaman via phmuseum.com)
They do not choose to be poor but are poor because they are born into households that have no money. They cannot change these circumstances unless they buy into the myth that the gang can provide them with a life of abundance.
More likely than not, they suffer from ill health created by the horrid living conditions. They are developmentally challenged and have learning disabilities. But their schools do not have the resources to help them overcome these hurdles.
Mental health challenges haunt these children. They swing from being aggressive and getting into fights to being withdrawn and depressed.
Many go hungry and suffer from malnutrition (even in Trinidad and Tobago!). How do we expect them to perform well in their classrooms? How do we expect them to give us love in return? Or anyone, for that matter?
We have betrayed them. What jobs can they do? Are we not perpetuating the problem?
They become ready-made soldiers for the gangs. Ruthless and heartless. We are now witnessing a transformation of the gang business into the deadly strangulation of the country’s business sector by extortionists.
(Copyright We-heart)
There are increasing reports of intimidation. How can this be managed when the trust in the police service is low?
In April 2023, seven police officers were charged with misbehaviour in public office and perverting the course of justice in an alleged extortion racket in Sangre Grande. This is a good thing (the TTPS acted), but how many others are doing the same? An unanswerable question.
The story of Donald “Zeeks” Phipps in Jamaica is instructive:
There, the control of the inner-city communities was possible because the successive administrations refused to invest in their development. Failing to invest in education, training, and job creation created a vacuum.
As government revenues shrunk, the power of “Zeeks” as a provider to the community increased. How was this provision funded? Extortion by the Dons in Jamaica was a significant stream of income. (Charles, 2002)
What are we waiting on?
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The scenario that you have painted is unimaginably awful for these young people. Why are the government agencies not investing more in these communities?