At this very moment we are living in one of those now familiar cycles of violence that targets the business community; violence that is sudden and frightening and which leaves even those of us who are not its actual victims chastened.
These past few traumatic weeks have witnessed an average of an armed robbery every two or three days. The phase will run its course then, sooner or later, it will pass. The bandits will take leave of absence presumably to spend their takings. Afterwards, they will begin to contemplate their next assault on the soft targets that our businesses have become.
In the course of the most recent and still ongoing spate of robberies at least two lives have been lost; victims have been wounded and as far as we have been told only one attack has ended in the criminals being apprehended.
The business community is still to issue its regulation public statement about the current spate of violence but that will come; yet another terse announcement about the need for the police to raise their game. Afterwards, the lull in the violent attacks will spawn an altogether false sense of security. Then, just as the business community begins to think that it can exhale again the bandits would have recharged.
An air of expectation has long settled over our downtown business community. These days, small high street traders risk their lives to make a dollar. They spend nerve-wracking days inside cramped stores, or at the entrances, easy targets for men – or increasingly these days, boys – who will not hesitate to kill or maim if their demands go unmet. And there is always the likelihood of collateral damage to people doing nothing more threatening than being out shopping.
No less sickening than the ever present threat of having a bandit stick a gun in your face is the seeming of impunity with which they operate, displaying a mind-boggling indifference to apprehension or terminal confrontations with would-be victims. If anything, their daring provides a sobering reminder of what appears increasingly to be the cluelessness of the police. It begs the question too as to whether the political discourses within the National Assembly or outside of it do not comprise ill-conceived agenda and whether the time has not come for the business sector to fashion an agenda of its own, one that reflects more closely those issues that pose a real and present threat to its own well-being.
Nor would it, at this juncture and even at the risk of sounding painfully monotonous, be inappropriate to wonder aloud as to why is it – or at least so it seems – that the bandits are getting much the better of these unending skirmishes and that over time they have established a kind of stranglehold which the police are hard-pressed to break.
The business community, rather than demonstrate even a modicum of confidence in the force is building its own fragile defences, high walls and ugly re-enforced metal gates with odd-looking peepholes and security cameras. In a growing number of cases too, businessmen are recruiting stern-faced ‘toughs’ carrying frightening-looking machine guns; if anything, generating even greater levels of public anxiety. That too is a manifestation of a statement about the level of the business community’s confidence in the Police Force. Some businessmen have long concluded that these days, acquiring anything that even remotely resembles effective security requires you to go to your own bizarre extremes.
