Loss to Panmen

Senator Arnim Smith former head of Pan Trinbago and former manager of the controversial Unemployment Relief Programme (URP), despite his badjohn image, which he perhaps found convenient not to dispel, spent a great deal of time and effort assisting steelbandsmen, including obtaining employment for those who were in need of work. Indeed, it can be said that his leadership of the steelband movement came at a time when the need for a tough leader was essential. His greatest contribution to the steelband movement, with which he had been associated for several decades, would come from his almost relentless fight to secure jobs for the players. And this, whether it was battling with the National Carnival Commission to hire steelbandsmen to assist in putting up the fence that enclosed the North Stand  for Panorama, or helping hustlers on the Beetham dump to obtain a “market” for goods they had rummaged, or gaining a “ten days” at the URP for many, when he was in charge.

He had never forgotten that he had grown up in an area of the underprivileged and had once hustled for a living. Even after he became a director of a leading company, and was living in an upper income area, he never forgot his John John and Nelson Street roots. Arnim Smith had been actively involved in the steelband movement, particularly in the now defunct Jewel 22 — not so much as a player, but as a manager, and had also been associated with Carib Tokyo. Earlier this year, he had prevailed upon a paint company — Penta Paints — to provide material for the painting of Tokyo’s pans. Smith was many things, but he was a positive thinker, who recognised the need to help keep youths off the streets. He approached it from several angles — by encouraging them to become involved in the steelband, by gaining employment for them, and through getting them involved in sport. At one time he ran a boxing gym at St Paul Street, and is credited with helping to reduce the level of violence in the lower income district. He had been sympathetic to the People’s National Movement in his younger days, but had argued he had been disillusioned when he felt that the Party was not doing as much for the East-West Corridor as he felt it could have done. And like another head of the steelband movement before him, George Goddard, he allied himself to a political platform opposed to the PNM. Smith went further than Goddard. His linking up to the United National Congress led to his being made a UNC Senator, a spokesperson for the main Party opposed to the People’s National Movement. And, ironically, even though the majority of steelbandsmen/women were undeniably pro-PNM. Senator Smith attracted a lot of “badjohns” around him, and his stentorian voice added to the crafted image, although he himself was not readily inclined to exhibit this. There is an apocryphal story that on one occasion when his band, Jewel 22, did not qualify in Panorama, he backed up his protest forcefully by placing a menacing object on the table, around which the protest was being argued. Still, Jewel 22, did not qualify. But “badjohns” and the marginalised readily identified with him, and he clearly enjoyed the image. Yesterday, following being hospitalised for chest pains, Smith who had been “all things to all men,” died at a private hospital.