The real one per cent

WAYNE KUBLALSINGH

I have ever been witness, in particular, to young men going about their merry ways, with maximum cool, confidence, committing the most horrifying crimes against our citizens. They then saunter off, as if they had just, like Hindus dotting chandan on the forehead, or Catholics doing communion or making the sign of the cross, performed some most holy and sacred rites.

Like Junior, placing boulders in the middle of the road at midnight. And when drivers stopped, stoning them, their windows and windshields, to disorientate, then grab and run, fleeing laughing into the night.

Or Raj and company, prising open the doors of my printery and bookbindery, hefting up my three-hundred iron press, my beautiful golden types for my gold-foil machine, which I bought from Germany, and to crown it all, emptying my two 1,000-gallon water tanks and rollicking away into the night as if they had just won the Boxing Day Derby.

Or for a few dollars more, drive down into the hinterland during the night – Chatham, Fyzabad – hops up the cows of Miss Phyllis, the goats of Miss Feroza, disappear with them up north, into the abattoirs, or into farms with common stock, slaughter the beasts; then go to mosque the following morning, washing their feet and hands clean as a whistle, as if they had just returned from Haj.

Or even for a few dollars more, rent out a piece, ammo, a car, other kit, camouflage, then conduct themselves to half-known places to carry out hits. Extortions, assassinations, group killing of gang members.

And stopping off, just for fun, in the wee hours of the morning, as the vendor loads her stall with apples, grapefruit, pears, bananas, pineapples, the most luscious of caimite and sapodillas, kick and wreck the stall, grab, and run like hyenas, leaving her to shout, wave her crook stick, helpless, while her precious gems of star apples roll away into the slip-drains.

In some of these instances, these wicked, wuthless kith and kin of ours end up dead. Junior, shot, summarily executed. Raj and his band of thieves ended up in a heap in a riverbank in Carapo.

But in many instances, the professionals amongst them – who walk coolly into retail shops, businesses, stuff money and merchandise into their bags, caps, pockets, handling their weapons and hatchets and cutlasses with all the protocols of trained soldiers – escape. They walk amongst us.

And some, the minority, caught and sentenced, achieve abrupt epiphanies. They become seasoned metaphysicians and philosophers overnight.

Boy, how I get here, boy? Or, it wasn’t me. Or, a man have to live. Or, if it have nothing good to do, you have to do something. Or, dog, oppression, boy, small man like me, why they don’t bring in them big man and them?

When I used some brass tactics to recover my brass types at a foundry, a scrap-iron dealer, the young man who had stolen it and taken it there to sell for a lil 20, was transformed, as mild as a mice, on the spot!

Yet I have never seen, in the post-Ramesh L Maharaj era, a drug lord in jail. Or those public officials who grace our political stages, for crimes of misbehaviour in public office. Or corruption. Or crimes against the ecology (EMA statute) or the economy. Or money laundering, or illegal offshore banking, or putting out hits, assassination.

Crime is not only a shopfloor or middle-management industry. It is ubiquitous, amongst all the percentages.

It seems that this society has selected "the Syrians" as the be-all, end-all, all-in-one scapegoats, bogeymen of our crime industry. And by a slip of psychological and cultural legerdemain, concluded that they, all all all, constitute the one per cent. Nowhere do I go that I am not informed, with deadly earnestness, that is the Syrians. They are the big fish, the ones behind all the drug- and gun-running in the crime and drug economy: the mafia!

Not good. Dog-whistling. It then goes to the minority ethnic groups, the Chinese, the Caucasians. Not good at all.

We will end up by backing up, in our cosmopolitan nation, small groups of citizens behind gated communities, with their backs to the wall, arming themselves for defence and retribution. Not good.

Historically, TT has been a crossroads for all ethnic groups. It belongs to no one, or two, ethnicities. As usual, we select slogans, epithets from the US, to absolve our own kith and kin, provide salve and succour.

There is only one one per cent in the twin-island republic of TT. The crooks, the criminals, the band of merry brigands who commit crimes of all orders with impunity. The thugs. The snide and cynical gangsters who daily walk amongst us. Like saints.

This is the ultimate one per cent. No other.

And the remainder constitutes the hardworking citizens. Getting up every morning to face the ignominy of traffic. Abiding by law, good, bad or ugly. Not sacrificing our children, neglecting them, on the altar of our own wantonness. These are the 99 per cent.

There must be only one opposition and one governing party. The one per cent are the crooks, the criminals, in all the percentages, high and low. They are the opposition.

And the 99 per cent must become one governing party, the ruling party, return our rule over them, defeat, destroy them. Anywhere, everywhere and right here!