On Thurs­day, Ki­ran Ma­haraj was ap­point­ed as the new Pres­i­dent of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce.

Her im­me­di­ate con­cern was the crime sit­u­a­tion.

Speak­ing to Sun­day Busi­ness af­ter her elec­tion, Ma­haraj said in the past week she knew of no few­er than sev­en peo­ple who had been af­fect­ed by crime, and the sit­u­a­tion was so per­va­sive that the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty had to get in­volved in find­ing a so­lu­tion.

“Each of us here has been af­fect­ed by crime, if I asked any of you. In this past week alone, I know at least about sev­en peo­ple who have been af­fect­ed by crime in one form or an­oth­er. So mul­ti­ply that now by every­body else, and you have a lot of cas­es un­re­port­ed as well. So what is caus­ing (the de­tec­tion rate) to be low? We need to find that out and the on­ly way to do that, I think, is first to ask the au­thor­i­ties what is caus­ing de­tec­tion rates to be low. How can we fix it? How can we sup­port some strate­gies that will fix it?” Ma­haraj said in her first me­dia in­ter­view with re­porters as Cham­ber pres­i­dent at the Hy­att Re­gency on Thurs­day.

“I think our pri­or­i­ty is go­ing to be two key ar­eas: how we deal with crime and the T&T Cham­ber with the joint cham­bers have been meet­ing and dis­cussing and we got a lot of feed­back from our mem­bers. The joint cham­bers will very soon be is­su­ing our find­ings and some of the rec­om­men­da­tions. So I think that where we are at now is to re­al­ly en­sure that there’s deep­er col­lab­o­ra­tion on the is­sue of crime to be able to deal with it,” she said.

The sec­ond key area, she ex­plained was small and medi­um en­ter­pris­es (SMEs), which had al­so been suf­fer­ing post-pan­dem­ic and had been fur­ther put to the sword by the crime sit­u­a­tion.

“The oth­er key ac­tion item is how we sup­port SMEs, which are suf­fer­ing. Many of them feel very dis­mayed and they feel as though they don’t fit in­to the frame­work that has been de­signed. And com­ing out of the pan­dem­ic, it has been a lit­tle bit worse. So it is how do we en­gage them, em­brace them, em­pow­er them, and get them to where they want to be, es­pe­cial­ly with re­gards to en­tre­pre­neurs and the youth. I think that a lot of young peo­ple have very great ideas and are very in­no­v­a­tive. They un­der­stand the ne­ces­si­ty of changes we need to make to­wards a bet­ter cli­mate in a bet­ter en­vi­ron­ment. And we need to em­brace all of that and look at the busi­ness mod­els around that,” said Ma­haraj.

These con­cerns are not un­com­mon to the head of the Cham­ber. Two days be­fore Ma­haraj voiced these con­cerns as her pri­or­i­ties, her im­me­di­ate pre­de­ces­sor Charles Pash­ley spoke on the prob­lems faced by SMEs, as a re­sult of crime, dur­ing his ad­dress at the Re­gion­al Sym­po­sium on Vi­o­lence as a Pub­lic Health Is­sue—The Crime Is­sue.

Pash­ley said that giv­en the piv­ot role SMEs served in stim­u­lat­ing and grow­ing the econ­o­my, pro­tect­ing them from the scourge of crime was al­so very nec­es­sary.

He said, “Fifty per cent of our busi­ness­es in your re­gion are SMEs. And your re­al­i­ty is the small­er busi­ness­es are the ones that are most im­pact­ed by crime. And it goes be­yond mon­e­tary im­pacts. It’s al­so a mat­ter of sus­tain­abil­i­ty as well, whether they can re­main in busi­ness. Whether the crime re­duces their busi­ness mod­el such that many cus­tomers no longer sup­port that busi­ness. It chal­lenges per­cep­tion, the high lev­els of vi­o­lent crime to­geth­er with busi­ness­es that have ac­tu­al­ly ex­pe­ri­enced se­ri­ous crimes such as rob­beries and bur­glar­ies cre­ate con­sid­er­able neg­a­tive op­por­tu­ni­ties for the busi­ness. And there­fore it neg­a­tive­ly im­pacts the busi­ness­es op­por­tu­ni­ty and there­fore, the eco­nom­ic op­por­tu­ni­ties for the coun­try which fur­ther im­pacts the so­cial is­sues that are caus­ing crime. So, in essence, un­less we ar­rest crime, then the is­sues that the un­der­ly­ing cause of crime in some is used, which is so­cial in­equities con­tin­ue to get worse.”

Ma­haraj agreed that SMEs were in a dif­fi­cult po­si­tion be­cause of the sit­u­a­tion and ex­plained that many of their con­cerns were left un­heard.

“I think that there’s a dis­con­nect. I feel the au­thor­i­ties and the pow­ers that be don’t un­der­stand some of the is­sues that busi­ness­es are fac­ing on the ground. They don’t un­der­stand that lis­ten, I own a small busi­ness, I close up my shop, I leave I go home, but now I don’t know if I’m be­ing fol­lowed. I don’t know if I could get to the bank, you know, to de­posit this mon­ey. There are sim­ple every­day things that are re­al­ly very stress­ful on small busi­ness­es, and they don’t even know if they call the po­lice sta­tion if some­thing hap­pens, is there a car (at the sta­tion to re­spond)?” she said.

The Cham­ber Pres­i­dent said this sit­u­a­tion could not be left sole­ly up to the gov­ern­ment to solve and in­deed praised the gov­ern­ment and Cari­com for in­clud­ing the pri­vate sec­tor in their dis­cus­sions.

“On the oth­er side, you have peo­ple I think, who are will­ing to help and I think that’s where the pri­vate sec­tor comes in. I think that’s where talk­ing to the Gov­ern­ment comes in. So get­ting all of this in­for­ma­tion and feed­back to then form a list and say, This is the ac­tion list of the biggest prob­lems. Let’s, let’s work these out. Who could do what here? I mean, this is about sit­ting around the ta­ble. I think time has passed where we are writ­ing to each oth­er back and forth. And that’s why I said I was hap­py at the time the sym­po­sium took place, be­cause I think it has opened up the di­a­logue,”

Dur­ing the sym­po­sium, for­mer TTCIC Pres­i­dent Pash­ley stat­ed the Cham­ber would wait un­til af­ter the event to put for­ward rec­om­men­da­tions. Ma­haraj con­firmed that the Cham­ber was still putting to­geth­er da­ta af­ter the event.

“The joint cham­bers came to­geth­er, and we did a sur­vey of all mem­bers and we’ve re­ceived a lot of valu­able feed­back. We al­so ask for rec­om­men­da­tions based on the mem­bers know­ing what they have to go through on a day-to-day ba­sis busi­ness.

“Now we’re look­ing at col­lat­ing all of that and then hav­ing a fur­ther meet­ing where we can start the col­lab­o­ra­tion process. But we will be re­leas­ing the re­sults as the joint cham­bers have tak­en a de­ci­sion we will be mak­ing those re­sults pub­lic,’ the new Cham­ber pres­i­dent said.