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.