Roxborough resident: Young people don't want to work

A ROXBOROUGH resident has slammed what he considers the lack of productivity within some sectors of Tobago, especially the Division of Infrastructure, Quarries and Urban Development.

Innocent Clarke, a retired works supervisor, claims there are no checks and balances at the division to gauge the performance of employees. He added the island cannot continue along this path.

Clarke spoke during the question-and-answer segment of a forum titled Community Echoes at the Scarborough Library on August 28.

At the forum, economist Dr Vanus James presented the proposals for constitution reform compiled during his meetings with community leaders and other stakeholders in a dozen communities across the island over the past eight months.

The National Advisory Committee on Constitution Reform, headed by former speaker Barendra Sinanan, submitted its report to the Prime Minister on August 2. The proposals contained in the report are expected to be discussed at a national public consultation later this year.

Clarke claimed during his tenure as a lower-level supervisor, “The children don’t want to work. They want to go to work for one hour, half an hour.”

He believes the country has not been getting value for money over the past few decades.

“So who to blame?” he asked. “There is no system in place in works to show what people did for their day’s pay. Nobody to say we use 20 bags of cement for the day. The people going to work for half an hour. We cannot leave this country so.”

Blaming the situation on bad parenting, Clarke said the absence of proper leadership in the home is contributing to the crime situation in Tobago. The island has to date had a record 21 murders for 2024.

“Everybody here knows their children and we failed 40 years ago. I does still hear my father calling me to beat me, and he passed over 25 years now.

“When we have children home and we cannot control them, what are we doing? We blaming the government, blaming the assembly.

"But the problem is we, the parents, we failed miserably.”

Long ago, he said, parents had a handle on their children and gave them tasks to keep occupied.

“At 11 years old, I could have gone to do gardening with my father. Now the parents not carrying the children to garden. As a matter of fact, like the children and them controlling the home.

“All of we know the children we have, who have gun. Right now, it mus be have gunman in here. So we know the people who are committing crime.”

Clarke said all of the discussions taking place in villages about constitutional reform will be useless if people do not correct the system.

“We have to clean up we act. We have to control we children.

"We can’t just start this process by saying that we want to reform. We have to clean up and then reform. If we take a new pot of food and put it in dirty plates, we not doing anything. Nothing at all.”