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Friday, February 28, 2025

Let’s not play smart with foolishness

by

800 days ago
20221220

It is dif­fi­cult to un­der­stand how any­one can mend an ill if the same per­son is prone to mis­di­ag­nose the prob­lem in the first place.

This ap­pears to be the case of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Fitzger­ald Hinds, who has tak­en a po­si­tion that 70 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion wants to see him and his Gov­ern­ment fail in their ef­forts to crack down on crime.

To put it in­to num­bers, with a pop­u­la­tion of around 1.4 mil­lion, if Mr Hinds’ cal­cu­la­tion is cor­rect, then 980,000 peo­ple are hap­py with what is tak­ing place in our beloved coun­try.

At a me­dia con­fer­ence on Mon­day, Mr Hinds said “it would be nice if I had all of your sup­port in Trinidad and To­ba­go in the fight against crim­i­nals” as he opined that the vast ma­jor­i­ty of so­ci­ety was work­ing against them.

While we are cer­tain there are some who ben­e­fit from crime ac­tiv­i­ty—in­clud­ing some in the po­lit­i­cal are­na—to sur­mise that 70 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion do, is a far stretch from re­al­i­ty.

As much as it suits Mr Hinds’ cause to iden­ti­fy rea­sons for the bad state of the coun­try, oth­er than his Gov­ern­ment’s fail­ure to get a grip on things, throw­ing out num­bers like this is a case of what is pop­u­lar­ly known as ‘play­ing smart with fool­ish­ness’.

Mr Hinds can­not se­ri­ous­ly be­lieve his own words to be true, when in fact most of the na­tion has been clam­our­ing for the Gov­ern­ment to do what­ev­er it takes to fix the crime sit­u­a­tion amid a record-break­ing year for mur­ders.

It is fool­hardy to mis­take strong de­mands for ac­tion as some­thing more ne­far­i­ous. Peo­ple sim­ply want crime erad­i­cat­ed and the crit­i­cism Mr Hinds and the Gov­ern­ment face are jus­ti­fied in the face of things get­ting worse.

To per­ceive that as a lack of sup­port, or worse, as a cam­paign to en­sure crime con­tin­ues, is to mis­di­ag­nose the prob­lem.

Once again, Mr Hinds is ask­ing the pop­u­la­tion to con­tin­ue to be­lieve he is the best per­son to fix the prob­lem, al­though we are re­peat­ed­ly faced with ex­cus­es and de­flec­tions when things in­ten­si­fy, in­stead of re­al strate­gies and vis­i­ble im­pacts.

One can re­call just weeks ago when faced with a video of Rose Hill RC School pupils cow­er­ing un­der their desks as rapid gun­fire was heard out­side, that Mr Hinds de­scribed the video as ‘mis­lead­ing’ in­stead of con­demn­ing the ac­tion and of­fer­ing com­fort and as­sur­ances to those af­fect­ed. His words lacked the em­pa­thy and care need­ed, es­pe­cial­ly from a gov­ern­ment that came in­to pow­er promis­ing to fix the crime prob­lem.

If Mr Hinds were to right­ly di­ag­nose the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion, he would find more than 70 per cent of the coun­try is tru­ly hop­ing and pray­ing the coun­try can be tak­en back from the hands of crim­i­nals.

The cur­rent crime sit­u­a­tion is a bom­bard­ment on the lives of peace-lov­ing cit­i­zens and on an econ­o­my that stands to lose more in­vestors as it con­tin­ues.

Sup­press­ing the spi­ralling cri­sis we now find our­selves in is crit­i­cal for the bet­ter­ment of 100 per cent of T&T.

It would be nice if Mr Hinds and the Gov­ern­ment ac­tu­al­ly do this.


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