Minister of National Security, Ret Major Gen Edmund Dillon, responding to the questions about Trinidadians now fighting with ISIS trying to return home seemed like a deer in headlights confronted by the faintest beam of media scrutiny. Add this to the sudden realisation he’s working with a comatose, if not actively subversive TTPS (whose only working part is its mouth), escalating crime, and international crises of which he knows little, and you get in response a string of clichés, technocrat-speak, and occasionally “huh”?
His Prime Minister tried to rescue him, reminding the country that we’d had an early sample of ISIS terror in 1990. But the 1990 comedy was not (according to its perpetrators) about trying to establish a caliphate; it was about inequality and perceived alienation and oppression.
The eminent and always reliable Imam Yasin Abu Bakr, interviewed last Thursday on the CNC3 News, had an articulate rebuttal: He would not advise anyone to leave here and go and fight with ISIS.
Such a thing, he said, is “foolish.” However (he continued) when you had young people locked out of the good life, opportunity, and even basic amenities, they don’t think of this as home. That’s a great answer, one that deserves to be listened to as it comes from the embodiment of 1990.
Bakr specifically mentioned young Africans as being those who left for ISIS, but one Farid Scoon, in a letter to a daily newspaper last week, claimed the majority were radicalised Indian Muslims. Entirely possible, but it has nothing to do with this column. Of more interest is the alienation which is brought on by inequity.
That idea (inequity as the cause of the social and economic chaos) has been around for some time. It’s a significant component in the work of eminent economists like Nobel Prize-winners George Akerlof and Amartya Sen. As Akerlof put it in his eponymous book: “animal spirits” are the ultimate drivers of any economy, and those spirits are constituted of psychological factors such as confidence, fairness, and corruption. Which explains a whole lot about our state today.
Needless to say, a change of government has not changed much as far as confidence and fairness go, and it’s unlikely it will. On a larger scale, I don’t think many people in and out of government have any idea why the country always seems to be in the throes of crisis after crisis, and desperately seeking frenzy as an escape. Those issues have been discussed in this space before, but I’ll summarise for the benefit of the new government who, I’m told, are avid readers of this column. (Especially the Honourable Minister of Communication.)
The root of the problem is a fragmented, disconnected and hostile population. Income and social inequality are stark; the majority don’t participate in the bright, sleek consumer economy we see on television. This inequity manifests differently in different parts of the body politic.
First the “urban” component of the population. As discussed before in this space there is no homogenous group of black people in T&T and a large part of the country is an enormous and growing underclass comprised largely of regional illegal immigrants. The National Security Ministry’s revelation of a year or two ago, that there were more than 100,000 illegals in the country who’s entered since 2000, needs to be added to the anywhere between 100,000 and 200,000 who came from the smaller islands between 1962 and 1990. This then has to be weighed against the approximately 400,000 Trinidadians who emigrated since independence.
The consequences of ambitious nationals (and many university graduates) being replaced by presumably not well-educated imports is something that attracts almost no attention in policy prescriptions. The newcomers live lives of hardship, inequity and resentment, and form a culture based on their experience.
(Knowing my readership, I’ll digress here for a dollop of evidence. An editorial in The New Today (a Grenadian newspaper) on September 11, commented on the results of our last election: “It is our suspicion that most Grenadians were ‘hooting’ for the PNM…for obvious reasons. It was the PNM then under founder leader and its first Prime Minister, Dr Eric Williams that opened the doors for large numbers of Grenadians to live and work permanently in the neighbouring twin-island republic.”)
But back to the reality of Trinidad today: a large urban population lives in underground Trinidad—far from the socialising institutions that civilise and nurture citizens. Its culture of violence and aggression spills over into schools, crime, and households, as we see on the news and FB. This culture is overwhelming the country.
Things aren’t much better in Indo-Trinidad. As the dust is settling from the last election, a picture is forming of a piranha-like frenzy at the state’s resources by the UNC/PP’s contractors, friends, and family. The imprecations of a “Hindu cabal” and its agenda point to something more than thievery; they signal a deep vein of animus among a powerful group in the UNC’s base who see themselves as outsiders and alienated, and unfairly dealt with historically. The contract rampage might have been in part a form of Indocentric “reparation.”
(Important to note that another section of the Indo-base, from cane-farmers to cardiologists, seems willing to abandon this way of seeing the world. They signaled this in election of Jack Warner in 2013 by-election. The leadership, though, differs.)
So enter the new government, whose plans are vague, policies still hazy, and collective demeanour seems long on tongue-lashing, but short on action. Importantly, the question of what to do, and even the specifics of the problem, seem absent from their horizon. They should know, at least, that the old formula of buying off ethnic blocs no longer works. Maybe it’s time to try something else.
