2 weeks Ago
Six weeks after the Randall Mitchell-led Ministry of Tourism enjoined itself for another year with the National Carnival Commission (NCC) and Caribbean Airlines (CAL) to stage a festival themed to welcome home tourists from all parts, bullets from high-powered guns flew at unsuspecting arrivals at Piarco International Airport. At once, the shooting that left one dead and one injured sent a message received by the whole population: the state of emergency (SoE) is over; back to killings. The more than 30 spent shells of 5.
56mm and 9mm ammunition reinforced the criminal messaging the public has come to know intimately: no one is safe; we will strike anywhere with impunity. The official NCC Carnival was that weird moment when Freetown Collective’s “Take Me Home” was chosen by State TV as the theme for the reign of the merry monarch. It encouraged a blissful suspension of the reality that while singing about “a place where my heart doh feel no pain”, T&T was under a crime-induced SoE and had just ended a year in which more than 600 people had been murdered.
The Piarco airport shooting shattered the illusion that “I will cross any ocean to find you”. The attack, coming during general election campaigning, has returned crime to the centre of the electioneering. Night after night, public meeting after cottage gathering, incumbent and aspiring politicians talk this and that against noisy backgrounds of T-shirted supporters.
Truth be told, there is one major issue in this election: runaway criminality that is murdering citizens, plundering homes, diverting investment, stifling the economy, traumatising our collective futures and deadening the soul of the nation. Unlike the Carnival season, no amount of flag waving, horn blowing, T-shirt wearing and music blasting can quell the mounting anxiety of a population on the retreat from criminal incursion. No number of promises can pay for the lives lost and those to be lost, or for the grief and trepidation that have become the national diet.
The public, whose votes are being wooed in this way and that, demands a government who will take action to secure their lives and livelihoods. The Piarco shooting was the second act of the post-SoE gunplay. The first made a casualty of 17-year-old promise from La Horquetta, Ezekiel Ramdialsingh.
A mere four days after the end of the SoE, the youth’s life was ended in a now-common manner: a drive-by shooting. This newspaper’s story of Ezekiel’s murder and the grief of his parents and community also tells of the young man’s talent and his struggles. A footballer of promise, a graduate of Arima North Secondary School who returned to the school to motivate under-14 and under-16 aspirants, young Ezekiel also worked at a plastic recycling factory and a car wash.
Neither of those jobs suggests the youth was seeing a clear career path post-secondary school, notwithstanding his obvious talents. The response from his MP, Foster Cummings, who was campaigning at the time of his death, was far from useful and betrayed an absence of optimism that crime can be seriously addressed. “This is the type of activity we would like to see off the landscape of T&T,” was the insipid banality coming from the man responsible for youth development since 2021.
T&T and the deceased deserve much more..
