Home Affairs Minister speaks on crime and unemployment

With so many unemployed, one of the growing concerns is that it will lead to an increase in crime. In an interview today with the Minister of Home Affairs, Kareem Musa, we asked him that very question. Musa quickly noted that the new administration assumed office with sixty-thousand people already out of work for more than six months. He added that he is conscious that unemployment directly impacts crime, which he is tasked to address.  So the government is working to stimulate economic activity and tackle the root of the issue moving forward:

Kareem Musa, Minister of Home Affairs

Kareem Musa

“Definitely, it has to weigh on my mind that with the current climate of over sixty people unemployed that there is a lot of desperation but I have every confidence in our department and we are handling it as best as we can but there has to be this all encompassing approach as a government that we cannot fight crime without first fighting poverty. We have to, as a government, take an all encompassing approach. I know that right now we are looking at the tourism industry to bounce back as a cabinet. I know that aggressively we are looking to agriculture; we are looking to the private sector to create employment. Definitely, right now as we speak it is just the residue of the previous administration. There was already a lot of unemployment – let us be real. There were over sixty-thousand people unemployed. This is not something that we just woke up today and there is unemployment. So, we know the situation. We know what the field is like and so what we are trying to do, because it cannot be government’s responsibility to hire everybody. It cannot be and so there has to be this partnership with the private sector to aggressively encourage them and create that enabling environment to bounce back and so that is where our focus is.”