Take back communities

By Bukka Rennie
July 30, 2003

As has become typical today, everyone is screaming to the Government: "Do something about crime! Put more policemen on the beat. Organise more joint police/army manoeuvres and lock-downs. Shoot the bandits. Pass the no-bail law. Shut down the Jamaat al Muslimeen". And so on and so forth.

Clearly the posture, the attitude, is that everyone other than ourselves is responsible. It is never about us collectively taking the responsibility to deal with the problems that beset this nation.

Let the Government do it or resign if it is incapable. That is why we voted for them. Let the police deal with crime, that is why taxpayers provide their salaries and emoluments. It is never seen as a two-way street, that all institutions at all levels have to be involved in a holistic manner.

Even the just retired Commissioner of Police did not know better. He sat there for the past few years, supposedly "managing" in silence, and when he is departing he says to us that he did not wish to say anything before but the criminals are better equipped than the police.

Apparently "managing" for him never meant dealing with the technological upgrading of the force in terms of equipment and skills and removing any obstacles to such an upgrade. He sat there playing dumb and consciously allowed his "men and women" to go out into the field to be out-gunned and out-smarted by bandits and criminals.

Now that he was leaving to go into retirement he suddenly thought it best to break his golden silence and inform all and sundry including the criminals that the underworld was better equipped.

He even seemed to want to suggest that he did not speak out before because he desired to protect his men and women. Imagine the absurdity: is it that policemen and women "could now dead" since he has retired?

It is my strong view that such a manager making such a statement upon retiring should be jailed immediately for irresponsibility or for his or her failure to be responsible.

Similarly the businessmen have been screaming for the Government to reduce crime. They have met and developed a common position on crime which they presented to the Prime Minister.

It is amusing how all these wise people have answers, as long as these answers do not involve them. Everyone knows that the most significant cause of crime, outside of the passion nurtured in domestic relationships and love affairs, is the drug trade.

To finance the trade of kilos of cocaine requires millions of dollars. Such financing is not available in the poverty-stricken areas such as Laventille/Morvant where all the murders relative to the drug trade take place. Such financing emanates from places like Valsayn, Chaguanas, Bayshore, Fairways and Westmoorings, etc, the communities of rich businessmen.

How serious and responsible can they be in taking anti-crime plans to the Prime Minister if they are not prepared to expose the culprits among themselves and within their communities who finance the importation of drugs and manage the big "laundromats" scattered across the landscape? It is nothing but a huge, sick joke.

The point is that we must take back control of our communities and control of all the affairs therein. Whatever the problem, the solution begins the moment we assert our collective control of community.

Some people are of the view that we are impotent to deal even with the question of crime because we are yet to "plumb the depths" of our systemic predicament, ie governorship as opposed to community responsibility.

Yet others say we are unable to implement anything because we are a "constipated" society. And though there are great truths underlying both views, I am hard-pressed to concede that these represent the whole truth or that they present the entire picture.

I grew up here in this place and space and have experienced too much to ever hold the view that the people have never known what it is to take responsibility for community well-being. We worked the concepts of pooled resources and collective decision-making such as "gayap", "len-hand", "sou-sou" and "panchayat" to the hilt to provide the wherewithal and infrastructure to build our communities.

One cannot help but be anecdotal to make the point. I grew up in Ramdial Lane in Monte Grande, Tunapuna and I can recall the work of leaders like Olive Rawlins who managed the community's "sou-sou", Lester Woods and company who led the Syncopators steelband to a particular pride of place, the Toolsie brothers in the Circular Sports Club that promoted sport, moreso cricket and volleyball and how we the children defended Ramdial Lane against all comers.

Later in the teenage years at Mount Hope I was to experience first hand the operations of three key institutions - the political party group, the village council and the youth group.

The community was always alive with local, regional and international issues, be it the Independence of Kenya or the objectivity of the nations of the Non-Aligned Movement, usually spearheaded by one of those three institutions.

Thieves were not tolerated in Mount Hope and there were the occasional broken bones to attest to that fact. There were no humps in the roadway to minimise excessive speed, so dangerous drivers were warned on two occasions then dealt with appropriately thereafter. On a few occasions we were forced to lock-down Mount Hope to rid the community of undesirable outsiders.

However, that sense of community responsibility, that sense of acting on our own behalf in our own interest has since then never been fostered by official society. Why are we running away from admitting that we are a dependent capitalist society, and that the capitalist path of development fosters the constantly increasing concentration and centralisation of social capital in the hands of a few with the ever-widening pole of poverty at the other extremity?

With all these mergers of economic units and various transnational corporations, and with social capital being therefore controlled by a few, all politics cannot help but reflect this tendency and be some form or some variance of governorship, ie concentrated political power. That's the nature of the beast. Why are we not admitting this?

One needs not be a rocket scientist to see that it is this particular form of modern capitalist development which, despite its great positives and achievements, has on the other hand fostered community impotence and constipation. Modern development has destroyed our sense of community. Radical politics that seek to empower communities is the only vehicle forward. That is the demand of the times.

In the mean, the more we embrace that kind of "modernity" is the more we will see people relinquish all responsibility and continue to bewail and lament and cry and scream for government to do this, that and the other.

We have sunken so low that today when a pet dog dies, people no longer bury it in the backyard but bags the dead animal and drive their shiny automobiles to some secluded corner or to the remote bank of some water-course to dump the carcass there without a single thought for the health and well-being of their community.

How then are we to discern what is, and what is not, crime?