Solving the problems of Morvant/Laventille

MANY CONSIDER Morvant/ Laventille to be ground zero for the country’s current crime wave. Located just east of Port-of-Spain in the foothills of the Northern Range, it comprises several densely populated working-class communities perched on the hillsides outside the nation’s capital. While Laventille is acknowledged as the birthplace of Trinidad and Tobago’s national instrument, the steelband, and is home to some of the country’s most successful steel orchestras, that fact is overshadowed by the areas’s long-standing bad reputation. Attempts to develop tourism around Morvant/Laventille’s wealth of history and culture have been largely unsuccessful because prospective visitors are warned that the area is a crime hot spot.

This isn’t a recent development. Morvant/Laventille has had a bad reputation for lawlessness and vice almost from the moment the area was settled by freed African slaves in the 1840s. In recent years the situation has been made worse, with an escalation in drug and gang-related violence which has put the area ahead of the rest of the country for murders and other violent crimes. Last year, 54 of the 262 murders recorded in TT were committed in Morvant/Laventille. Out of 103 murders for this year so far, 25 were committed there. Fitzgerald Hinds, Minister of State in the Ministry of National Security, who has been Member of Parliament for Laventille East/ Morvant since 1995, holds a ministerial portfolio that puts him on the front lines of the war on crime. As MP for a constituency regarded as a stronghold of criminal activity, Hinds is familiar with the social and economic factors that have made the area a major breeding ground for crime.

But even as he candidly acknowledges the monumental challenges facing his constituency, Hinds firmly believes that there is hope for Morvant/Laventille. He is also passionate in defending the ruling party’s track record on crime, insisting that contrary to widely held perceptions, the Patrick Manning Administration has been attacking the problem on several levels. “The one thing we can’t do is to run into any immediate spasm and panic over the issue. We are not doing that,” he told Sunday Newsday in an interview which was done as he walked through a section of his constituency recently. “The reality is that there is far too much killing, far too many illegal guns on the streets and we are attending to that. In terms of the gang violence and this crime thing . . . it is not what we are going to do, it is what we have been doing.”

Hinds, an attorney by profession and this country’s first dreadlocked Government Minister, is the latest People’s National Movement (PNM) parliamentary representative in a constituency that has remained solidly in support of that party for close to five decades. He strongly believes that education must play a key role in the fight against crime. “There are 765 schools in Trinidad and Tobago of which about 135 are secondary schools. Every school in this country that is either a state school or state assisted is a fight against crime because education is the key. Education is the best buttress or fortress against crime,” he explained. “When you watch the reckless driving you see on the road, that is a demonstration of a lack of education, lack of judgment, lack of ability to assess.

“Some young people in this country have driver’s permits and they never did the regulations, they never did a driving test, because you have corrupt officials in the Licensing Office who are selling driver’s permits to illiterates. “Someone who can’t read a stop sign, a fellow who won’t be able to recognise his own name if he see it on a billboard — they have driver’s permits and we have road deaths.” According to the Laventille East/Morvant MP, Government’s current housing thrust is another vital component of the ruling party’s multifaceted attack on crime. “The family is the bedrock of the community. You can’t have strong communities unless you have strong families and you can’t have a family without a physical place to put down roots,” he said.

“The Government’s very robust, vigorous housing programme is an effort to stabilise families, stabilise communities and is therefore part of the effort against crime.” Hinds told Sunday Newsday it is also important for citizens to recognise and accept that they have a role to play in transforming the national community. This, he said, is a critical component in the success of the Manning Admin-istration’s Vision 2020 and could be key to transforming Morvant/Laven-tille into a peaceful and progressive community. At the end of the day, he explained, if every citizen has an understanding that he or she must strive for achievement, goals and to maximise personal potential, the result, will be “better minds and better quality work.”

“It is our Third Worldism, to my mind, our developing country status and the attitudes, behaviour and culture that go with that . . .  that is the largest part of our problem.” Pointing to a recently-constructed pavement along the Lady Young Road which had several gaping holes that posed a threat to pedestrians, Hinds declared: “The people who did this pavement got paid! In a sense, taxpayers’ money was wasted. This is one banal, petty example of what is replicated a thousand times in education, in social service delivery, in health, in national security and in the public and private sector. “This is the reality and we need to do something about it. This isn’t the responsibility of the Government alone.”

As he shared his vision for the transformation of Morvant/Laventille, the PNM MP said it was widely believed that the area is filled with “dry, barren land where there are only gunmen and guns.” “When you move around my constituency, particularly from the air like in a helicopter, you get to see that there is a tremendous amount of greenery,” he pointed out. “It is a myth to think that this is a concrete jungle and there is no space for planting.” Stopping near a piece of land just off the Lady Young Road and a few metres from Morvant Junction, Hinds declared: “Look here. This is Laventille/Morvant. This is a piece of land. You see fig, you see coconut, you see guava, you see mango. I am saying that however you might think of Morvant/Laventille, there is land space that the people can utilise and do things like you see here.”

Hinds said some years ago he tried to introduce a Grow Box project in the constituency. The idea was to encourage constituents to use whatever available space they had, including kitchen windows, backyards and even steps, to grow a variety of herbs and food crop. However, he has since expanded on that vision and is now thinking in terms of a programme that will bring sustainable commercial activity into the area. “Can you imagine,” he asked, “the Lady Young Road on a Sunday morning and, with the permission of the police and the authorities, that street is lined with vendors? “Just as you can go to ‘Restaurant Road’ (Ariapita Avenue, Woodbrook), or ‘Doublesville’ in Penal, you could drive across the Lady Young Road and get eggs, lettuce, chives and one or two little products, sold by the people in the community right here.

“When they finish, they clean up neatly and you will never know that anyone was selling there just that morning. These are some of the developmental things that I have in mind for Morvant/Laventille.” As he walked along, Hinds was approached by several constituents who wanted his assistance as MP. One woman, standing on a street corner awaiting transportation, complained that since a mechanic had set up operations on the pavement just across from her home, there had been an escalation in burglaries in the area. Another, when asked her views on the crime situation in the area, told the MP: “Too much brutality where the police is concerned. They enforce the law too much on poor people. We don’t be doing nothing. “I mean, ah fella might take a little bun (smoke weed) and play a little cards and thing. How much crime is that? It ent much crime for them to be coming down and jacking up a man.”

Hinds admitted that one of the major social challenges in Morvant/Laventille is getting the large number of barely-educated, unemployed young men in the area to turn away from crime and get involved in legitimate, productive, income-generating activities. He is of the view that most of them lack confidence. “They don’t believe that they can go out there, acquire skills, become skilled and adept and whatever they choose to do, get an education, or start some small business which will grow, as all businesses can grow, and make an honest dollar,” the MP observed. “In their minds they don’t have that self-confidence. They suffer, at the base of it, from poor self-esteem and therefore they think that rather than live like a man and earn an honest dollar, they have to live like rats.”

Expanding on his theory of the rat-like existence of some within the community, Hinds expressed the view that some had “the ethics of a rat” and chose to live like vermin, hiding in drains and dark places. He added: “When there is light they don’t come out. They come out to operate in darkness or under cover, to snatch a piece of cheese and run back into the drain.” According to Hinds, at the heart of the crime problem in Morvant/ Laventille is an absence of spirituality and “a sense that God is boss.” He offered this advice to the persons within Morvant/Laventille who are involved in crime: “As David Rudder says, you don’t have to cheat to be a winner, you don’t have to steal to get enough. God says thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not rape. You don’t have to do them things to get pleasure.” NEXT WEEK: Only prayers could save this place