The effects of lost youth in Guyana

Nov 21, 2010 Features / Columnists, My Column

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By Adam Harris

It would seem that for the next few weeks, or even longer, the nation would be fed a diet of horror stories not least among them, attacks on households and violence. It has not escaped my attention that brothers are killing each other and that armed men are making it a habit of attacking homes and business places.
What is not surprising are the ages of the gunmen who attack homes. One of them who appeared in court was merely 18. At that age young men should be enjoying life, playing games, partying and trying to establish meaningful relationships with members of the opposite sex. Many years back, some of us were just leaving school and bringing to an end the best years of our lives.
I have been talking a lot about the need for people to get rid of cash transactions. Without cash there can be no robberies because no bandit would want to steal credit cards and cheque leaves. They can do precious little with these.
But the people who have large sums of cash would justify the need for currency in their possession. They would say that the people with whom they conduct transactions want cash. To those people I would say that if indeed I have to conduct a transaction, I would want to believe that I know the person and that the person knows me. Of course there would have to be that level of trust, so there is nothing to prevent us from accepting each other’s cheques.
If there is little or no trust then there is nothing to stop us from going to a bank and having that institution solidify our transactions by way of a manager’s cheque.
I notice that there was no one who complained about accepting cheques from the liquidators of Clico and Globe Trust. It would have been interesting to hear them say that they would prefer cash. These very people, under normal conditions would try to say that they do not have a bank account and therefore, cannot change cheques.
But when they reach a certain age and it is time for them to collect their entitlements from the National Insurance Scheme, they get vouchers. It therefore goes to show that all the talk about needing cash is just an excuse to hide what they have to avoid paying taxes.
Of course, there are those who can do no better than accept cash. Drug dealings are always done in hard cash because I cannot see a man writing a cheque for a large cash transaction unless he has an established business. The end user with his pennies would most certainly rely on cash.
Having said that, I come to the young men who would say that they need money but that they cannot find work, or work for the sums paid by employers. And to make matters worse, none of them saves a cent. I am willing to bet that the men who helped themselves to some $10 million from an Eccles home would be dead broke by the end of the year.
Another thing that bothers me is the violence. People are no longer communicating with each other. Scarcely a day goes by without someone calling me to say that some administration is refusing to listen to the things that affect them. Last week a man complained about a noise nuisance. There was loud music blaring in his ears to the extent that his children were extremely uncomfortable.
He said that he called the police who came but did precious little. It took a call to the Police Commissioner to get action. This should not have been.
People talk about substandard constructions in their communities. The government, more particularly, Minister Robert Persaud, called on people in the various communities to keep an eye on the contractors and to report substandard works.
From the calls I have been getting I am led to believe that their appeals to the authorities are falling on deaf ears and that the contractors are being allowed to continue along their merry way. I also know that if the newspaper with which I work focuses on these things, there is the risk of being accused of an anti-government stance.
But for any successful community there must be communication among the members. This must start in the homes, so when I heard that brothers are killing brothers, in one case over $1,000 or the equivalent of US$5, I was horrified. The courts will have to deal with this issue. Suffice it to say that the relatives of the assailant are deeply saddened and they are closing ranks, forming a kind of shield around the assailant.
I believe that they have adopted the attitude that they have already lost one family member and that they must save the other. This is not strange. Some years ago, the late Quintyn Taylor told me of an incident in which a brother killed another in Garnett Street, Campbellville
No one was ever prosecuted because the family members used the same excuse about losing one and saving the other. The police left with the belief that whatever happened was an accident. The truth was that one brother pushed the other down a flight of stairs and caused his death.
Two days ago another brother pushed a broken bottle into his elder brother’s neck. The reports suggested that this was in the offing since the assailant was in the habit of beating the elder brother whenever they imbibed.
The community could have avoided this, but these days we tend to mind our own business, and talk when the deed is done. These are sad days in Guyana and a change has got to come.

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