Hail 'Suzie', who paid with his life

December 26, 2001

I knew him simply as "Suzie". In those days back in the early '60s he ran with a group of QRC compatriots and classmates, all interesting characters indeed. There were Gurasingh, Pinkie, Smiley, Pobosco and a few others.

"Suzie" led that crew with a panache and a bold creativity that were certainly unmatched in the then city of Port-of-Spain.

It was the time of Independence and the "college-boys", all caught up in the spirit of the times and in the blowing, global "winds of change" had begun to flap their wings, testing in the process of their goings-on the moreso of socially acceptable convention and the limits of established, authoritarian order.

In this regard, "Suzie" and his crew were mercilessly devastating.

One Friday afternoon, on the eve of another Intercol clash, Suzie and his friends held a scrawny, stray dog and tied a CIC monogram around its neck. They paraded that dog around the environs complete with whistles and flags.

On another similar occasion they rode their bikes, all seven of them, into the Big Yard of St Mary's College hooting and tooting, waving their blue and blue ensignas, raising hell, so to speak, until they were chased out. But not before everyone enjoyed a good laugh at the bold effrontery of Suzie and his crew.

Seeing him on Intercol Day itself was always a wonder to behold. Even the famous Joseph Churchill-Roosevelt Hope of St Mary's College would often have to concede to Suzie's outrageous get-ups.

But the one incident that really stands out was Suzie's invasion of Audrey Jeffers' Ole Mas Competition, then held annually for the schools of Port-of-Spain and environs.

Band No 10 was introduced by Mrs Jeffers as Carl De Souza's "Football Match". Suzie's crew invaded the stage in a fit of pretended madness and simply kicked the daylights out of each other.

"Thank you! Thank you! Football Match", Mrs Jeffers kept pleading but to no avail. The crew intensified the "kicking-up" and did not leave the stage.

At that point Mrs Jeffers tried to be diplomatic.

"How about a round of applause for the Football Match?"

Suzie's crew kicked each other until out of sheer frustration and disgust, Audrey Jeffers closed that year's competition. When Suzie received his calling, many were amazed, many doubted until they saw the sincerity with which he functioned. His boldness and creativity, now positively focused, were still quite evident. At the Customs he would preach every lunch time to all who wished to listen. He built his congregation out of sheer will power and hard work. Most of all his integrity on the job shone beyond compare.

Our contention is that his steadfastness on the job, his devotion to duty, which led eventually to his death, was derived not only from his religious leanings but also from the culture of the Public Service which he joined after leaving school.

We described elsewhere the civility of the Public Service and objectively analysed its development in T&T as follows: "...We are largely a society of clerks, commission agents, shop-keepers and peasants, in which the culture of clerks predominates, because clerks are crucially spinal to any semblance of social stability and to the circulation of whatever levels of value, profits and savings, that are created and generated locally through the major commercial activity of 'buying' and 'selling'.

"Our story is the story of the 'hinterland', the outposts and frontier-towns, in which the nature and character of enraged speculators, the greed of hoarding, insecure commissioners, traders and transient settlers have left their indelible marks, and would have long since destroyed all attempts at society but for the civility of clerks...

"...The history shows that to further develop, international capitalism required free, open trade in a one world-market, and capital as a social force required to be depersonalised, ie to free itself of direct ownership by individuals and families such as described above.

"Outposts such as T&T joined the modern world in the post-colonial period at the point when the major feature of economic development was the internationalisation of a professional class of managers to not necessarily own capital, since ownership per se was no longer a prerequisite, but to manage and wield capital accumulation and generation as a purely objective global force, without subjective considerations. The IMF and World Bank and other lending and financial agencies being the classic cases in point.

"Samir Amin in his study, Accumulation a World Scale, referred to this period in which the peripheral areas were 'integrated into the world market' as the period in which 'capitalism had become a world system, and not just a juxtaposition of national capitalisms.'

"The results of this according to Amin, are rapid urbanisation, structural imbalances (eg demise of agriculture), disparity in income distributions and most of all, rapid growth of the civil administration and expenditure to maintain it...

"...The clerks who maintained the social stability between the commission agents, shopkeepers and peasants long ago have now as a social force been transformed into a massive Public Service, with the added responsibility of managing State enterprises and divesting or not divesting them in the interest of the society as a whole.

"This much maligned Public Service is the most significant powerful creation of our peculiar development. It is the repository of all kinds of superior human resource and financial management skills, as well as the embodiment of all the democratic traditions and practices that we have been striving to work out in the course of our social transformation and development.

"Our particular history did not afford us the early emergence of a robust entrepreneurial spirit and we are only now attempting to foster this by the work of the very Public Service through various agencies such as ADB, YTEPP, DFL, SBDC, etc. In the absence of true 'captains of industry' who have the nation at heart, the Public Service has fulfilled the role.

"Various political regimes have had problems with the fact the Public Service here is the motor of all development and have sought to curtail its powers, since they view it as a counter-balance to executive power. But remove the Public Service and the Public Service regulations and we will have nothing but open barbarity between the commission agents, shopkeepers and peasants as they jostle for the spoils..."

Mr De Souza was a public servant par excellence. But there came a different dispensation through which the rules of the game changed and De Souza refused to play and paid with his life. We say again and again "but for that civility..."