DA­REECE PO­LO

Se­nior Re­porter

da­reece.po­lo@guardian.co.tt

Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies Pro Vice-Chan­cel­lor and chair of the Cari­com Repa­ra­tions Com­mit­tee, Sir Hi­lary Beck­les, has called for a “chang­ing of the guard” to ad­dress crim­i­nal­i­ty among black Trinida­di­ans.

Sir Hi­lary made the rec­om­men­da­tion while giv­ing an ad­dress at the Lidj Ya­su Omowale Eman­ci­pa­tion Vil­lage at the Queen's Park Sa­van­nah, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day.

Used a crick­et anal­o­gy of "chang­ing the guard," where bats­men choose a fresh guard af­ter scor­ing 50 runs, Sir Hi­lary sug­gest­ed that a good bats­man should ask the um­pire to change the guard to make it more chal­leng­ing for the bowler.

Re­call­ing that more than 60 years have passed since Trinidad and To­ba­go and Ja­maica were both part of a 1962 ini­tia­tive for in­de­pen­dence and repa­ra­tions, he said it is now time for cur­rent lead­ers to make space for fresh ideas.

He said ad­dress­ing the crime com­mit­ted by black males in Port-of-Spain and Kingston, Ja­maica, is cru­cial, as both na­tions are strug­gling with this prob­lem de­spite the best ef­forts of their lead­ers.

“We have a younger gen­er­a­tion of men who we are strug­gling to bring them in­te­grat­ed in­to the so­ci­ety and the econ­o­my as re­spon­si­ble cit­i­zens, and both in Kingston, Ja­maica and Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, we have a prob­lem with young male black crime,” he said.

“So, we have to take a new guard. There are is­sues of a psy­cho­log­i­cal na­ture. There are is­sues about cit­i­zen­ship. You can­not as­sume that the adults will see the world in the same way that the chil­dren will.

“We can set stan­dards but we have to find strate­gies to help them along the way. So those young men in Ja­maica, in Port-of-Spain, who are wreak­ing hav­oc up­on their com­mu­ni­ties, we need to find a strat­e­gy to bring these young peo­ple back in­to our fold and ed­u­ca­tion is one part of it but there are oth­er as­pects of it. There are oth­er as­pects that we have to con­sid­er. This is a phe­nom­e­non. A phe­nom­e­non re­quires re­search, re­quires ob­jec­tive think­ing... so let us find a way to take a new guard.”

Not­ing that T&T has in­vest­ed a sig­nif­i­cant amount in ed­u­cat­ing work­ing-class peo­ple, more per capi­ta than any oth­er coun­try in the re­gion, he said there are still young men who are re­sis­tant to these ini­tia­tives.

“This is not a prob­lem to be dealt with in terms of a blame game. There is no blam­ing. There’s on­ly un­der­stand­ing.”

He said it rais­es the ques­tion of what went wrong or what was not ad­e­quate­ly ad­dressed over the past 60 years to en­cour­age this be­hav­iour. He said based on the cur­rent un­der­stand­ing, he must con­cur that recog­nis­ing crime as a pub­lic health cri­sis is ap­pro­pri­ate.

“I sup­port that the­sis be­cause I know that the psy­cho­log­i­cal harm that has been done to our peo­ple gen­er­a­tion over gen­er­a­tion is enor­mous. So, when we speak of repa­ra­tions, we’re not just speak­ing about throw­ing mon­ey at the is­sue, we have to find a way to re­ha­bil­i­tate these young peo­ple, bring them equal­ly in and it re­quires psy­cho­log­i­cal and pub­lic health in­ter­ven­tions. In oth­er words, we have to start again with a new guard to look at this prob­lem through dif­fer­ent eyes.”

$$ woes for Eman­ci­pa­tion Sup­port Com­mit­tee

The Eman­ci­pa­tion Sup­port Com­mit­tee (ES­CTT) is fac­ing fi­nan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties in fund­ing the an­nu­al com­mem­o­ra­tion of the abo­li­tion of slav­ery.

This was the word from ES­CTT chair Za­kiya Uzoma-Wada­da yes­ter­day, as she said they need­ed $3.7 mil­lion to set up the Eman­ci­pa­tion Vil­lage at the Queen's Park Sa­van­nah this year.

How­ev­er, she said the ES­CTT has re­ceived just $1.4 mil­lion from Gov­ern­ment, with small­er al­lo­ca­tions that she con­sid­ers in­signif­i­cant.

“It is a very, very ex­pen­sive ex­er­cise and we re­al­ly need more fund­ing. This year we are in a cri­sis be­cause the funds that we have does not cov­er the costs and then you have not ac­tu­al­ly re­ceived the funds so we can't even deal with some of the costs,” Uzoma-Wada­da said, not­ing the events start as ear­ly as May.

She al­so said there are on­go­ing calls for the coun­try's his­to­ry of eman­ci­pa­tion to be taught in schools. She ex­plained that the ES­CTT holds com­pe­ti­tions for both sec­ondary and pri­ma­ry schools, aim­ing to en­cour­age stu­dents to learn about the cul­ture. How­ev­er, she urged the state to take fur­ther steps to for­mal­ly in­clude this in the school syl­labus.