APNU touts skills training to tackle youth crime

The A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) has blamed a significant portion of youth crime on the inability of young people to generate wealth due to a lack of skills and opportunities.

Speaking at a campaign rally in Bagotville over the weekend, retired Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Williams touted the return of academics and trade skills in public schools as a means of empowering young people and preventing them from being engaged in illegal activities.

“In the community high schools there were hybrids you could have focused on your academics and at the said time, you learn a skill or a trade. So, when you step out of the school you can go into the field of work, you can go into the Guyana Technical Institute or you had a school leaving exam, once successful you could have gone on to fifth and sixth form.”

Currently, Williams said, these programmes no longer exist. The community high schools have been turned into secondary schools, and students who have academic challenges are dropping out without an alternative to learn a skill or trade. In recent years, accelerated focus has been placed on Technical and Vocational Education. Williams contended that many dropouts are the ones found prowling the streets, engaged in delinquent behaviours and ultimately criminality.

He said that Guyana in the past had thriving skills industries that would have today allowed young people to be meaningfully engaged and better able to generate wealth.

“We had persons producing refrigerators, producing ceramics, wares such as tea cups, saucers. We had persons in the industry producing clay bricks and those same bricks they are importing. We had everything here to produce them. We had textile mills producing clothes.”

Williams reminded that the long-defunct National Service was also an institution that sought to bring delinquent, indisciplined youths and those from dysfunctional homes in line, assisting them in becoming meaningful contributors to society.

The former police officer said the APNU will return measures that empower citizens. He said the party will provide the tools to create independent, able-minded citizens that contribute to their own success.