By Raffique Shah
September 11, 2024

On the unusual occasion that I venture out of the sanctuary that is my humble home, I would invariably encounter people who ask about my health, a formality they usually dispense with before I can answer them. Two out of three of them would hurriedly shift focus to the subject they likely want to talk about, or likelier give me their opinion: crime.

We all know that crime as an issue did not start yesterday. Sure, it reached crisis proportions a few years ago in this country. But it was always an issue that politicians and citizens who form the electorate can vent their spleen on, and many times cast their votes on.

Indeed governments have risen or fallen on the issue that is crime. Nothing I or anyone else can say or do will alter the criminal mind or reform the society to what people expect to be normal.

Twenty years ago if someone had told me murders would average five a day or more, I would have told them dey mad. Life had no value in countries such as ours. It matters not whether the victims are young or old, rich or poor. If the murder statistics had remained “normal”, meaning a mere one to two every other day, they might have been tolerable.

But as they keep growing to horrendous digits, and when we factor in other violent crimes such as home invasions, robberies at shopping establishments and, the worst of them all, shootings at the hospital, a place people go to for medical assistance, this country is at an all-time low. It is not that we are alone in this horrible mess: there are many “hotspots” in cities and countries one might consider “normal” or peaceful. I hear from friends abroad about shooting sprees in safe cities such as Toronto and Montreal.

Last weekend at New York’s Labour Day celebration, gunmen went on a shooting spree, killing and/or wounding more than a handful of revellers. Before the week was over, a 14-year-old schoolboy shot and killed a few more on a high school compound in the US.

I imagine if you keep daily checks on such events across the world in cities and countries more popular than ours, the results would be staggering. But I am not in the comparative mode. I am bloody angry because people I hardly know expect me to give them solutions to our national crisis.

Although I have never received $1 from government for anything close to crime fighting, I have always given freely of my thoughts and opinions to anyone who cared to listen or read what I have to say.

Back in 1968, I was among a small group of military officers who engaged in training and guiding young people who were about to leave secondary school and go out into the big open world. We soldiers taught them simple lessons in life—hygiene, health and fitness, manners, interpersonal relationships, etc.

Years later, some young man walked up to me, politely introduced himself and proceeded to tell me he was grateful for the skills and training we soldiers taught him that made him what he was years later. Nothing, no money, no rank or decoration could make someone like me happier.

What was really a government programme changed for the better the lives of young people at a critical juncture. At age 14-16 they could have gone off in the direction the programmes pointed them, or they might have fallen in with the gangs of that time.

I, and others like me, who were trained at some of the best military colleges in the world, taught young soldiers how to kill and how to save lives, but we also taught them how to navigate in their own lives as they became adults and moved on.

Through my writings over the past 40 years I have guided people’s lives on paths that will have made them good citizens, good parents, and hopefully lifetime students. Because of the way life is structured today, everybody wants to “get rich quick”.

But not everybody is willing to do the work necessary to get there. The risk of death is far more appealing to many, mostly young people, than earning an honest million dollars.

Also the scoundrels who hide behind respectability that goes with being involved in seemingly successful businesses are not averse to stealing a million here to a billion there…you know, the businessman who deposits the same amount of cash every day regardless of the traffic in his business. Or the contractors who steal mercilessly from the public’s purse. Is it any wonder that many young people look at the lifestyles of the rich-but-unscrupulous and think to themselves… “Wayy Sah! Ah want dat.”