MiLAT graduate appeals for programme to be saved

Akash Sama­roo

Lead Ed­i­tor-Pol­i­tics

akash.sama­[email protected]

Akeel Tim­o­thy still re­mem­bers beg­ging his moth­er not to send him to the Mil­i­tary-Led Aca­d­e­m­ic Train­ing (Mi­LAT) pro­gramme.

At 18, he be­lieved he did not be­long there. He had al­ready spent more than six years in the Trinidad and To­ba­go Cadet Force, loved mil­i­tary life and was not the stereo­typ­i­cal trou­bled teenag­er many as­so­ci­at­ed with the pro­gramme. But af­ter sit­ting CSEC ex­am­i­na­tions twice and emerg­ing with just one pass, his moth­er saw some­thing he did not. She saw a young man who need­ed fo­cus.

Eleven years lat­er, the 29-year-old Diego Mar­tin en­tre­pre­neur says that de­ci­sion trans­formed his life.

To­day, he owns sev­er­al busi­ness­es, in­clud­ing trans­port, car rental and couri­er com­pa­nies.

But as Gov­ern­ment sus­pends Mi­LAT while re­view­ing its fi­nan­cial vi­a­bil­i­ty, Tim­o­thy fears hun­dreds of young men could now lose the same op­por­tu­ni­ty that changed his fu­ture.

En­rolling in 2015, Tim­o­thy said he found teach­ers and in­struc­tors who re­fused to let stu­dents fail.

“Some of them would stay with us un­til af­ter one o’clock in the morn­ing try­ing to help us un­der­stand some­thing we didn’t get,” he said. “Then they still had to be up around 4.30 am to start phys­i­cal train­ing. They re­al­ly went the ex­tra mile.”

One teacher, Mrs Tony, left a last­ing im­pres­sion.

Af­ter at­tend­ing a fu­ner­al, she re­turned to school short­ly be­fore class end­ed and no­ticed Tim­o­thy had giv­en up on an Eng­lish sum­ma­ry-writ­ing as­sign­ment.

“She picked up the pa­per and thanked me,” he re­called. “The next day she came back with that same pa­per and worked through it with me.”

The re­sult was some­thing Tim­o­thy once thought im­pos­si­ble.

“To­day, I have a Grade One in Eng­lish.” By the time he grad­u­at­ed in 2017, Tim­o­thy had in­creased his aca­d­e­m­ic achieve­ments from a sin­gle CSEC pass to six over­all, earn­ing five ad­di­tion­al sub­jects dur­ing his two years at Mi­LAT.

But he in­sists aca­d­e­mics tell on­ly part of the sto­ry.

Tim­o­thy said Mi­LAT’s great­est achieve­ment was trans­form­ing young men from com­mu­ni­ties plagued by vi­o­lence in­to dis­ci­plined, pro­duc­tive cit­i­zens.

“You had boys com­ing from some of the rough­est com­mu­ni­ties in Trinidad and To­ba­go. To­day, a good num­ber of my batch are serv­ing in the mil­i­tary.”

He re­jects the long-stand­ing stig­ma that Mi­LAT catered on­ly to delin­quent youth.

That is why news of the pro­gramme’s sus­pen­sion left him deeply un­set­tled.

“I felt hurt. I felt dis­ap­point­ed. My anx­i­ety start­ed to rise,” he ad­mit­ted. His great­est con­cern is not for grad­u­ates like him­self, but for those who had on­ly re­cent­ly en­tered the pro­gramme.

“What are we go­ing to tell those young men?” he asked. “Do we tell them to go back home? What if this was their last chance? What if they end up falling back in­to crime? Some may not even have been in­volved in crime be­fore, but now they may fall in­to it be­cause they have lost this op­por­tu­ni­ty.”

Tim­o­thy is urg­ing Gov­ern­ment to ex­haust every al­ter­na­tive be­fore con­tem­plat­ing per­ma­nent clo­sure.

He al­so chal­lenged De­fence Min­is­ter Wayne Sturge’s ar­gu­ment that there is no sta­tis­ti­cal ev­i­dence link­ing Mi­LAT to re­duc­tions in crime. For Tim­o­thy, how­ev­er, the strongest ev­i­dence is found not in num­bers but in the lives of the grad­u­ates them­selves.

His own in­take, Batch 1501, was once con­sid­ered among the most dif­fi­cult co­horts in Mi­LAT’s his­to­ry.

Yet, he said, it went on to pro­duce more than 20 sol­diers and sailors, along­side en­tre­pre­neurs and oth­er pro­fes­sion­als.

“If what peo­ple con­sid­ered the worst batch could pro­duce busi­ness­men, sol­diers, sailors, air­men and pro­duc­tive cit­i­zens,” Tim­o­thy said, “then imag­ine what this pro­gramme can con­tin­ue to do if we give it the chance.”