My great-nephew was 18 years old: two gunmen ambushed him and ended his life

The phone rang at 4am on Tuesday last: it was my brother, calling from Port of Spain, Trinidad. Shaika, his grandson, had just been shot in the neck and was critically ill. I could hear a mobile phone ringing as we spoke. I held on for a second, then he returned on the line. Shaika had just died.

My great-nephew was 18 years old. He worked at a local hotel and was on his way home when two gunmen ambushed him and brought his life to an end. Murders in the capital city are running at one a day: 40 years ago, half a dozen killings a year astounded local folk. The urban centres of the Caribbean are drenched in the blood of their young.

Shaika was born a have-not in a country rich in natural resources, governed by a middle class that boasts fine homes and cars. Banks are overflowing with dosh. Loans are easily available, overseas investors proliferate and sections of the urban working classes are relatively prosperous. But thousands of others have fallen through the cracks. The young are restless and aimless: I have been told that, out of a total population of 1.2 million, about a thousand young men, banded into gangs, are wreaking havoc in these urban communities.

Shaika was not one of them, but a handful of his contemporaries may be. I have done my best and spent a fair bit on phone calls to residents, to the police, to the protagonists, even. I have been unable to pin it down. These conflicts have no material base: not drugs, not competition for jobs, nothing I could identify. It is all gratuitous.

I can only conclude that, in these tiny islands, as rich and poor are thrown helter-skelter into an increasingly globalised world, the citizens are rudderless as they negotiate choppy waters. Their leaders offer no direction other than the accumulation of material things. No population can drift interminably, without the leadership to provide a clear sense of where the country is going and why. Chaos, violent chaos, is inevitable.

Shaika was a casualty of this process. There will be many more.

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