"Fire bun the system" was the battle cry of Anil Roberts, Minister of Sport when he addressed an audience of Life Sport enrollees at Capital Plaza Hotel yesterday.
Life Sport, a programme established by the Ministry of Sport to reshape the lives of young men from marginalised communities through sport, was hosting its prize giving for a Sport and Family fun day hosted the week before.
Roberts expressed pride in the talent and commitment displayed by these young men who he said many would consider as "no use, a waste of time who no good, the only thing they good for is to lock them up."
He consistently throughout his address, reinforced two key ideas for his listeners: The system was designed for them to fail; and the people in power do not want to see them succeed.
"The system is designed for people like you to fail... When resources abound, the less people who share in it, the more for other people... So the more people we can keep out of the society, out of the mainstream, out of successful sustainable jobs, the better for some".
His remarks received standing ovations at various points throughout his address and he fed off this energy to cap off his diatribe against "the system" with his call to "fire bun the system."
Roberts however, failed in his address to clearly identify the specific individuals or institutions being alluded to as a part of this "system."
The only target he singled out as a potential stakeholder in this system was the media, who he accused of deliberately boycotting the event: "understand this, if it had fight here today, or if it had a man come and shoot a next one cause it had a borderline... all the media would've flood down here to show that you all are negative and that you not good."
With regards to events like Life Sport prize giving he added them following: "They don't want to show that because all of you suppose to stay down...cause if you come up, it have less for we on the top. Well we must say fire bun that system."
He continued on to tell the young men that they must not let the system win and that they must make it their life's work to ensure that they overcome the system.
He said that the Life Sport programme facilitated this and railed against those in "the system" who didn't want to finance the project: "The system wants to shut down Life Sport because it is making too many of you successful."
The programme he said had been running with no finances to pay its participants for months due to no fault of his, yet the young men had consistently continued to work without renumeration.
He said that the young men were always on time and dedicated unlike many of those in parliament who held the power and arrive to parliament late, 95 per cent of the time.
Finally, in his closing remarks, he spoke of how negative reinforcement could programme an individual to fail.
"When a child is hearing that they're not supposed to succeed, that they supposed to fail, that is wrong." He cited the example of a young child he had once met in East Port-of-Spain that expressed shock at seeing him, a "celebrity", in his community.
He asked the audience how it was that a child of that age could come to see himself as being lesser and concluded that this type of negative mental programming was probably starting from a very young age in their homes.