Alissa Trotz is editor of the In the Diaspora Column
As almost every Guyanese knows by now, Local Government Minister Kellawan Lall, recently asked if the government would prefer to deal with a health crisis rather than assist the City Council, is reported to have responded: “Well, if there is a health crisis in the city I’ll be glad because it will remove the city council. They’ll be responsible for it.” These vindictive and reckless remarks will not help to dislodge perceptions among many that politics are being played with the lives of ordinary citizens, that the people of Georgetown have been penalized over the years for electing a city council that did not meet the approval of the government, or that starving the city of funds and putting all the blame on the Council was one way of introducing an Interim Management Council through the backdoor.

In a press conference given a few days ago, President Bharrat Jagdeo was reported to have described City Hall as ‘visionless’. Unlike his Local Government Minister, he recognized that the people of Georgetown were important, although it would probably have helped if he had taken the opportunity to distance himself from Minister Lall’s highly irresponsible comment.

Years ago, someone I know was trying to get her then eight year old daughter to bed without a fuss. Finally she gave her a choice: you can either go straight to bed or you can have a glass of milk and then go to bed. I still remember her daughter’s response: Why do you get to decide the choices? What if I don’t like either of those choices? I feel a bit like this here. We have a deformed political culture where to reject the milk then bed choice means you agree to the straight to bed choice. In this climate, to declare Minister Lall’s response objectionable or to raise questions not asked at the President’s press conference, is to find oneself in danger of being accused of supporting City Council. You are stuck between a rock and a hard place. So let me be clear. Few will disagree that the performance of the Georgetown Council is woeful and is not serving the needs of the residents of the city. I don’t agree with President Jagdeo that the Council is visionless, since it has made a number of suggestions over the years to generate much needed revenue, including the use of parking meters in designated spaces, and the generation of electricity from the garbage at Princes Street, all of which were torpedoed by the Government.

In his remarks, the President detailed the billions of dollars his administration has poured into the management of Georgetown. He indicated that support will continue until local government elections are held which, if it does not happen before the end of this year (an unlikely prospect), will likely be further postponed until 2012 after the general elections.

The President’s remarks seek to give the impression that his government bears no responsibility for the shameful failure to hold local government elections since 1994, even though reform of the local government system has been on the agenda for easily over a decade now. Why are key reforms proposed by the Constitutional Reform Commission of 1999 and the Task Force on Local Government   stalled in the Special Select Committee? How in good faith could opposition parties agree to a Local Government Commission in which all of its members will be appointed by the government, as the PPP/C is demanding?  Clearly this would go against the aim of the Local Government Commission, which is to remove the heavy hand of central government off the local government system, to enhance the independence of the municipalities and neighbourhood councils, and to have a large say in the matter of subventions and taxation/enterprises that fund operations for all of the Councils. Another issue to be dealt with by the Select Committee is the criteria to be applied in determining the level of subventions from central government to local government bodies. The problem is that none of these critical reforms has yet been legislated for. And the National Assembly has unanimously agreed, year after year, that local government elections will be postponed until these reforms are completed.

Were these reforms to be pushed through in the spirit intended, why could we not at least hold municipal elections? One would imagine that given his recognition of the urgency of the situation in our garden city, the President would not be opposed to this and to saving the billions of dollars he states his administration has pumped into the City over the years. The minimum that is required is to establish wards and to register individuals and groups to contest elections on a 50/50 representational basis. This means that half of the seats would be contested by individuals and half by political parties/groups. The Mayor would be elected by councillors. GECOM has gone some way in effecting these preparatory measures. Nor do local elections necessarily have to wait until after general elections, since there is no law that prevents national and local government elections from being held in the same year. Whether the Elections Commission has the capacity and funding to carry both local and national elections off in one year is a matter for GECOM and not the President of Guyana to say (and it is not impossible; look at Trinidad and Tobago, with a voting population that far exceeds ours!).  Of course the President is well aware that no funds have been budgeted for the holding of elections this year, phased or otherwise.

The rivers of garbage in Georgetown, which made the rains of past weeks so difficult and nasty for residents – two weeks ago I met a taxi driver who had made a good living as a plumber and had to leave his trade because he contracted leptospirosis from dirty water a year or two ago, which nearly cost him his life – bring to mind another issue, one that has to do with the piles of discarded plastic and glass bottles and containers on the seawall, in Le Repentir cemetery, in the trenches, on the roadside, everywhere one looks. To be sure, as citizens, Guyanese need to take responsibility for not littering the environment, a point that was again made on a recent edition of Girl Talk on local television. And then there are responsibilities of the government, which it is also the duty of Guyanese, as active citizens, to keep on top of and to demand.

It is therefore a good time to remind the Guyanese public that an Environmental Tax was introduced in 1995 by way of an amendment to the Customs Act. In the debate leading up to the passage of this important legislation, then Minister of Finance, Mr. Asgar Ally told the House of Assembly that the environmental tax would be levied on every unit of non-returnable metal, plastic, glass or cardboard container of any alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverage imported into Guyana. Unfortunately the tax did not apply to domestic users or the importers of empty containers, leaving a loophole which one of the major entities that was affected by the tax found (they came to Guyana, set up a local factory, imported the empty bottles and simply avoided the tax).

The Hansard (the printed record of debates in parliament) reports Mr. Asgar Ally as saying: “I want to assure this House that we have taken heed of the point made by the Honorary Minority Leader, and the Opposition spokesman on finance, that these funds be put in a special fund for environmental activities. It is our objective to have this environmental fund be put in place, so that the proceeds of this levy can be put into that fund”.

Fair enough. But let us look at what has happened since then! With the introduction of the Environmental Tax, the amount collected by the Government of Guyana has gone from some $82.3 million in 1995 to $674 million in 2009. To date, over five billion dollars have been collected. Contrary to the assurances given in Parliament to the people of Guyana, none of this money was ever placed into a separate fund. Instead, it simply went into the Consolidated Fund and was used for general purposes. As Champion of the Earth, perhaps President Jagdeo could instruct his Minister of Finance that instead of finding time to berate the World Bank, Christopher Ram and whoever else has said something or asked questions he finds objectionable (I presume I am now next, and if it follows the usual pattern a letter will be issued dismissing me as having some personal vendetta against the government and instructing the public that my questions are therefore not legitimate and do not need to be answered), he should tell Guyanese people exactly who made the decision to scrap the environmental fund promised by his predecessor Asgar Ally. Was this debated in parliament, made public in some way that we have all missed? And if the money was in fact allocated within the Consolidated Fund, precisely how was it used over the 15 years of the tax’s existence in the ways originally guaranteed? Moreover, given what one would imagine would be the relatively higher use of those containers in urban areas, exactly what proportion of the tax was allocated to Georgetown? Given the tremendous problem of littering (including those ubiquitous Styrofoam boxes), one imagines that part of the original plan was to dedicate some of the monies levied through the taxed containers to ridding the city and country of the litter they generate and to identify ways of recycling and cutting down. The opposition parliamentarians should also tell the Guyanese people why they are not doing their job properly and raising this issue in and outside parliament and keeping it on the public radar– were they sleeping when Mr. Asgar Ally made his speech back in 1995?

Guyanese deserve better than this. We really do. It is truly time to stop having to pick between a rock and a very hard place.