In 13 days, T&T will turn 60 years old as a na­tion. It is a ma­jor mile­stone and, if it were a hu­man be­ing, it would have been a time when you were get­ting close to re­tire­ment and when you could look back and de­ter­mine whether you made a re­al dif­fer­ence in the world, your com­mu­ni­ty or at least your fam­i­ly.

In terms of the life of a na­tion, T&T is still rel­a­tive­ly young, but one can rea­son­ably ad­mit that as a na­tion we have failed to make the most of the re­sources we have been blessed with, and a lot of that stems from a lack of good lead­er­ship.

To put things in­to per­spec­tive, T&T has al­ready pro­duced and used 25 tril­lion cu­bic feet (tcf) of nat­ur­al gas. It has an­oth­er 20 tcf of gas in its 3P re­serves and an es­ti­mat­ed 50 tcf to be dis­cov­ered. In all, it is pos­si­ble that this is­land of 1.3 mil­lion peo­ple would have sat in a basin of be­tween 45 and 100 tril­lion cu­bic feet of nat­ur­al gas, world-class by any stan­dard.

When you add to that, T&T has dis­cov­ered and pro­duced over 2.5 bil­lion bar­rels of oil, with at least an­oth­er 500 mil­lion bar­rels in re­serves. You can see that this coun­try has been a world-class hy­dro­car­bon province.

This coun­try has oil and gas on land, nearshore, and in deep wa­ter. It has light sweet crude, heav­ier crude, heavy crude, tar sands, dry gas and wet gas. Al­most any kind of hy­dro­car­bon de­posit, this coun­try has it.

T&T has al­so been blessed in terms of its lo­ca­tion, out­side the hur­ri­cane belt, is lo­cat­ed lit­er­al­ly in line with the ma­jor ship­ping routes and is a gate­way to Latin and South Amer­i­ca.

The ad­van­tage of be­ing be­low the hur­ri­cane belt is not to be un­der­es­ti­mat­ed be­cause as we have seen re­cent­ly in Do­mini­ca and An­tigua and be­fore that in Ja­maica and Grena­da the cost to coun­tries, both in terms of the eco­nom­ic cost of re­build­ing and the toll and mis­ery for cit­i­zens hit by hur­ri­canes, is im­mense.

So 60 years on, where are we as a coun­try?

At the time of writ­ing this ar­ti­cle, there had been 360 mur­ders, 22 in four days, and a Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice who seemed at sea in terms of what to do.

Mere days be­fore, he was brazen-faced enough to try and con­vince us that se­ri­ous crime was not on the rise and what we were see­ing was mere­ly height­ened aware­ness of the killings be­cause of the preva­lence of CCTV cam­eras. That Com­mis­sion­er Ja­cob would feel such a spin could work, or re­mote­ly make sense, should wor­ry all of us, be­cause if you do not think there is a prob­lem, you can­not be ex­pect­ed to fix it.

Mere days af­ter his sug­ges­tion that there was no re­al in­crease in se­ri­ous crime came the blood­bath, and his re­sponse was that every­one was re­spon­si­ble for the present crime wave.

I agree that we are all to take re­spon­si­bil­i­ty. As a so­ci­ety, we stopped see­ing the com­mu­ni­ty as im­por­tant in rais­ing a child. We felt that an ap­proach that said on­ly par­ents could seek to cor­rect their chil­dren was ac­cept­able. An ap­proach that saw par­ents go­ing to schools to take on teach­ers if they did not like the teacher’s ap­proach to man­ag­ing their charges.

We are to blame for not hav­ing the lead­er­ship to take ac­tion at the le­gal ports of en­try where we know that many of the weapons that make it in­to the hands of gangs and crim­i­nals are com­ing in, and not us­ing the scan­ners as we should, due to ob­jec­tion by some work­ers.

Imag­ine the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice is in yes­ter­day’s news­pa­per con­firm­ing that the Po­lice Ser­vice is aware a lot of the guns are com­ing through those ports, and yet there ap­pears ei­ther in­er­tia or a de­lib­er­ate turn­ing of a blind eye to the prob­lem. Where is the lead­er­ship in all of this?

An­oth­er ex­am­ple of where we have turned a blind eye or failed to deal with a long-stand­ing prob­lem is the cor­rup­tion at the Li­cens­ing Of­fice and the im­pact of not putting in place a li­cence plate sys­tem that al­lows the po­lice to track ve­hi­cles that may be used for crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty. How long has this been an out­stand­ing prob­lem, and yet the lead­er­ship is sim­ply not there to at­tend to it?

The time has come to ask who ben­e­fits from crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty, who ben­e­fits from the turn­ing of a blind eye to the scrap met­al in­dus­try, un­til it wants to be­come a law on­to it­self, with the con­comi­tant im­pact on in­fra­struc­ture?

Crime and the fear of crime will de­rail any so­ci­ety. It hurts economies.

The con­tin­ued high crime rate is al­ready a drag on busi­ness in T&T. When you con­sid­er the ad­di­tion­al cost of se­cu­ri­ty, the fear of open­ing too late, and the un­will­ing­ness of some em­ploy­ees to work late shifts, it has al­ready in­creased the cost of do­ing busi­ness and the lev­el of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty in the so­ci­ety. Some of those ad­di­tion­al costs have been passed on to con­sumers.

Crime al­so im­pacts com­mu­ni­ties and the abil­i­ty of some law-abid­ing cit­i­zens in at-risk com­mu­ni­ties to make a bet­ter life for them­selves and their chil­dren. We must not pre­tend to not know that in some com­mu­ni­ties peo­ple are afraid to live there if they have or­di­nary jobs, this is be­cause they al­most have to pay a tax to those on the block if they want to live at peace in the com­mu­ni­ty.

In some com­mu­ni­ties and towns in T&T, busi­ness­es are ex­tort­ed by the so-called com­mu­ni­ty lead­ers or their agents, and this can lead to some peo­ple sim­ply not get­ting in­to busi­ness or caus­ing ad­di­tion­al costs to the State.

Yes, there are di­rect costs to the State in high lev­els of crime, the cost of not be­ing able to put in in­fra­struc­ture in some com­mu­ni­ties with­out the use of se­cu­ri­ty ser­vices, and the lack of com­pet­i­tive bid­ding for jobs in at-risk com­mu­ni­ties, these are all cost to the State, not to men­tion the amount of mon­ey spent to po­lice those ar­eas.

So crime is a ma­jor chal­lenge, and it can on­ly be dealt with by high-qual­i­ty lead­er­ship in the po­lice ser­vice and the Gov­ern­ment.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, at present, there is lit­tle sign this is the case.

To be con­tin­ued.