Guyana’s lost generation

Jul 08, 2010 Editorial

There is a lot that needs to be said about human behaviour in this country at this time. Within the past two weeks there have been more killings outside the crime wave that haunted Guyana not so long ago. That crime wave was spawned by five men who broke out of the Camp Street jail and created a web of protection that defied the authorities for years.
The web of protection involved teenage boys who automatically got the support of their parents and relatives, for such is the situation that caused the phrase that blood is thicker than water.
These teenage boys were later to be seen by their peers as heroes simply because they had guns and could defy the authorities.
Their level of intelligence did not allow them to recognize that any defiance against the law enforcement authorities would be short-lived and ruthlessly halted as was the case with those in Buxton and elsewhere where young men opted for violence rather than something that would make them worthwhile citizens in the land.
When the police confronted the Fine Man gang over time they kept confronting young boys, many of them not quite fifteen and a few barely sixteen.
A surprise raid by the joint Services on a cow pen early morning when the gunmen must have just gone in to rest after a night on the prowl led to the killing of six men, the eldest being Rommel Remand who had attained the ripe old age of 21.
The other victims were listed as 16 and 17-year-olds. All this happened three years ago and should have been seen as a sign of the times or the harbinger of what the society was becoming.
It is an admission of failure that the police must now issue a wanted bulletin for a 17-year-old who they say has formed a violent gang in the city and who has committed serious crimes.
The society in recent times must have been taken aback by reports that there have been armed confrontations between the police and the young men, most of them not out of their teenaged years.
One was shot in the vicinity of Mandela Avenue after an armed confrontation. The society immediately took the age of the lad into confrontation and muttered that the police were using unnecessary force. Then there was the fatal attack at a city night club that left a visiting overseas-based Guyanese dead. Again the attackers were said to be teenagers.
A raid on a Kitty nightclub by a group of gunmen left a waitress dead and once more the killer was said to be a teenager. The killer of the young policeman at Lamaha Springs on Friday night is now said to be a teenager.
The teenage years are when young people play games in clubs; when they are preparing to leave school if they are not academically inclined to seek further education; when they walk the streets hunting jobs to help their parents sustain the family.
It is now clear that left to them, people are not going to set up clubs and youth groups as they did in the past. This is now the responsibility of large organizations such as churches and established clubs.
But even the established clubs are having a hard time recruiting young people. The view is that the parents are so hooked on taking their children away from the world of play that they actually curtail their children’s ability to develop social contact.
The drive to send children to a never-ending round of lessons may very well be spawning the young criminals who are now rebelling or who feel dispossessed because their parents cannot send them to lessons, too.
A government has a responsibility to tackle the social issues where all other fails. To refuse to do so is to court disaster and we believe that this is already the case.

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Guyana’s lost generation

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