A 16-year-old, an 18-year-old and a 20-year-old are dead. Having graduated, reports say, from being lookouts for bandits, they took up arms and went on the attack in Non Pariel. Fortunately for their victims, but unfortunately for them, they were unable to make it in the big league. Quite possibly, the police were only able to effectively crush them because of their lack of experience. The question now is, how many others there are just like them – training up to be hardened criminals? And can anything be done to turn their lives around.
Since it seems that it was common knowledge that these young men were acting as lookouts for the real hardened bandits, one wonders why the police were not informed so they could have been arrested and charged. What they were doing – aiding and abetting – is against the law. However. it is not uncommon to enter some rural and urban communities and see young men; teenagers and in their twenties sitting or standing aimlessly at street corners. They may not all be lookout men, but because they are idle they are vulnerable to this as well as falling prey to drug use and trafficking.
The majority of them would be school dropouts; poverty, abuse and illiteracy would have dominated their lives. Unfortunately, there are still very many instances where children move through the school system and at the age of 14, still cannot read or write their names. Obviously, their lack of ability would have been ignored by countless “teachers”, who would have “promoted” them from class to class, simply because their ages demanded this; it would also have been ignored by their parents or guardians who just could not be bothered to even open their books.
Today, in nursery, primary and even secondary schools around Guyana, there are candidates who will grow up, and some already waiting in the wings, to fill the shoes of Malcolm Junior ‘Coolie Boy’ Alleyne, Kwesi Lewis and Aubrey Glasgow. They are being abused at home and at school; they barely have enough to eat and some of them have nothing at all. The cracks through which their predecessors fell are growing ever wider and there is no safety net at the bottom.
A few months ago, when the first National Grade Six Assessment results were made public, Minister of Education Shaik Baksh expressed shock that some 5,000 children had either failed the Grade Two and Grade Four assessments, or had not written them at all; children, who, at six or seven and eight or nine years old, had already begun to slip. Neither Minister Baksh nor any of his officers has since said how, if or when this will be corrected and what measure would be put in place to ensure that the education system did not fail those children.
And because there most likely is a multiplicity of factors that affected their performances, this is an issue that should also engage the Ministry of Human Services and Social Security. One hopes that if these two agencies have not already begun collaborating on this it will happen soon.
While we applaud the police on their prompt action and heave a sigh of relief that three bandits will never steal again, we must also recognize that the prevention aspect is still being ignored. Killing bandits will not reduce crime when there are three waiting to take the place of every one who dies. The bandits-in-training/in-waiting are the ones to tackle now, before the disease becomes an epidemic.
