{"id":55796,"date":"2023-09-25T20:38:36","date_gmt":"2023-09-26T00:38:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=55796"},"modified":"2023-09-25T20:39:10","modified_gmt":"2023-09-26T00:39:11","slug":"the-blood-of-our-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=55796","title":{"rendered":"The Blood of Our Children"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
\nSeptember 25, 2023<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Dr.<\/a>And so the monstrous, mindless, criminal madness continued on Wednesday with the \u201cexecution-style killings of three children and a 19-year-old in the crime hotspot of Heights of Guanapo\u201d. This massacre also left five people wounded, two of whom are children. Yet the Government keeps calling for talks with the Opposition as if there were some magical elixir in that encounter.
\n
\nSuch a request was made recently when, in her inaugural address to the Parliament, President Christine Kangaloo listed crime as the primary danger to the country. She declared: \u201cThe urgency is obvious. The pain and the suffering are unbearable. These alone should drive parliamentarians to put aside their party rivalries, join hands across the aisle, and collaborate on how to stem crime and criminal conduct.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wish it were so simple.<\/p>\n

The obstacle to such civility is inherent in the system itself. In the Westminster parliamentary system of government, the Opposition is considered \u201ca government in waiting\u201d. That is how it sees itself, and must always see itself. The only rationale for its existence is to become the next sitting government. There is never any incentive for it to help a sitting government to remain in power.<\/p>\n

Apart from the Oppo\u00adsition\u2019s disincentive of getting together with the Government to ensure any fundamental social change, the prime minister hit the nail on its head when he remarked: \u201cI don\u2019t have to tell you that one of the problems that we have in the country is a total lack of and loss of respect. And, as a result of that, after the way that first meeting [between the Government and Opposition] went, it was made quite clear that future meetings were not on, and they served no useful purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of these days, the prime minister will have to ask how much he contributed to that lack of respect among the elected representatives of the people.<\/p>\n

Our citizens also have to ask if we ever established among ourselves what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called the social contract in which we regarded ourselves \u201cas a single body, [possessing] only a single will which is concerned with their common preservation and general well-being\u201d.<\/p>\n

Now the rubber has hit the road and social cleavages have begun to become more apparent. We bemoaned PNM\u2019s failures in terms of the solution to the crime problem, but what does the UNC offer in its stead?<\/p>\n

As much as one might be sympathetic to the travails of the Opposition leader, she ought to be a more innovative leader. She also needs stronger, more independent people around her.<\/p>\n

I do not believe our electorate is \u00adracially polarised. While the PNM locates its base in the African section of the society and UNC among the Indian section, a fair number of citizens are willing to throw in their lot with any group that offers to improve the people\u2019s social condition.<\/p>\n

The UNC should ask why it has failed to attract the professional classes, the progressive intellectuals and what might be considered the intelligentsia and it\u2019s not because \u201cdey \u2019fraid Indians\u201d. The UNC must also ask itself what it is about their central philosophy that keeps that vital segment of the popu\u00adlation from buying into its message. It should also decide whether it accepts Lloyd Best\u2019s political philo\u00adsophy that the relevant division in our society is \u201ctribe\u201d or \u201cethnicity\u201d rather than the Marxist categories of class division.<\/p>\n

What does the UNC offer in terms of solving the crime problem? Its National Economic Transformation Masterplan, 2020-2025 (NETM) devotes three and a half pages to what it calls \u201cNational Security\u201d. It lacks intellectual rigour and does not include the general public in its solution to reducing crime.<\/p>\n

Apart from arguing that \u201cthe Rowley regime has been a total failure when it comes to the protection of our citizens\u201d, it devotes two pages on its solution to crime. It does not speak about tackling the causes of our crime, and nothing it says would have prevented the carnage we witnessed on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

In its Monday night meetings and press releases, the UNC has acknowledged that the murders in Guanapo reflected \u201ca systematic breakdown of all institutions\u201d. However, this observer would welcome a more defined approach to the crime problem by the UNC.<\/p>\n

The prime minister says that he has spoken with the UNC about crime since 2015 but nothing came of it. \u201cAs Opposition Leader, I didn\u2019t wait for people to tell me to cooperate with the government. I saw that as a responsibility to the people of Trinidad and Tobago.\u201d<\/p>\n

None of our political leaders has presented anything that attacks the fundamental causes of the crime problem. The use of dashboard cameras in all police vehicles, the building of judicial complexes quickly, the implementation of electronic monitoring bracelets, the re-establishment of the Ministry of Justice, the utilisation of UWI Debe Campus for the training of our protective services\u2014proposals by the UNC\u2014seem peripheral to the solution of our crime situation.<\/p>\n

The UNC will have to do better if it wishes to solve the crime situation. If the NETM is all they can bring to the table, then they had better stay at home and continue to complain about the \u201ctotal failure of the Rowley regime\u201d, while the blood of our children stains the ground upon which we trod.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe September 25, 2023 And so the monstrous, mindless, criminal madness continued on Wednesday with the \u201cexecution-style killings of three children and a 19-year-old in the crime hotspot of Heights of Guanapo\u201d. This massacre also left five people wounded, two of whom are children. Yet the Government keeps calling for talks … Continue reading The Blood of Our Children<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,1,895],"tags":[44,171,49],"class_list":["post-55796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-general-tt","category-murder-2","tag-crime-in-tt","tag-selwyn-r-cudjoe","tag-tt-govt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55796"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55798,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55796\/revisions\/55798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}