If the political landscape has changed since last year, in practical terms the things that impinge on the daily lives of citizens remain very much as they were. The weary householder crawls out of bed in the morning to go to work, and even if his or her local area is fairly tidy, he or she will have encountered any number of assorted garbage piles, blocked drains and potholed roads before the workplace is reached. In fact where the capital is concerned the new year is barely under way and we are hearing the same recitations we have been listening to for more than a decade, the primary one being that the city is facing a “garbage crisis.” The situation is no better in many of the rural areas, where the environmental problems would try the patience of even the most placid of residents.
In a general sense, a fair amount of what affects the quality of daily life comes under the jurisdiction of local government and not central government, and local government has all but collapsed in this country. Municipal authorities, NDCs and IMCs alike are barely functioning. In fact, some of the corruption about which citizens have been complaining and which probably played a role in the PPP/C’s loss of an overall majority, occurred at the local level. New roads which subside after a matter of weeks or months, or improperly constructed bridges and the like, are things of which local residents have direct experience; they know the local officials responsible for the contract, they know the contractor involved, and from seeing the operations every day they know if these meet the specifications which are required. They draw their own conclusions, therefore, and are not dependent on the media for their perceptions of what has happened.
The larger problem of local government cannot be rectified, of course, until there are local government elections which have not been held now since 1994. In principle, at least, there was a general consensus some years ago that the framework under which these should be held needed a major overhaul, and to that end in 2001, the late Mr Hoyte and then President Jagdeo set up a Joint Task Force on Local Government Reform. This had a time-frame of one year to come up with recommendations, but the two sides could not agree on certain issues, and the task force had to be reconstituted on more than one occasion. While there was accord in some areas, after eight years certain matters remained unresolved, and Mr Jagdeo then decided to extinguish the task force and move the negotiations to a parliamentary setting.
Things did not go much better in the House; the five local government bills went to Select Committee, but in 2009, the government decided to use its majority to pass two of them – the Local Authorities (Elections) (Amendment) Bill and the Local Government Commission Bill. The opposition objected because it had been agreed by all the parliamentary parties that that they should have been passed as a package, and because the first mentioned was supposed to capture all the amendments in the laws and should therefore have been dealt with on completion of the others. The rather limp argument of the government that the Bills should be passed in the order in which they were tabled, convinced no one. Furthermore, both items of legislation ensured that the stranglehold of central government on local affairs would continue through the agency of ministerial control.
Thereafter, the combined opposition subsequently withdrew from the work of the Select Committee, on the grounds that the government did not want to make any concessions, and because the recommendations of the Joint Task Force had not been incorporated into the proposed legislation. In the event, the government did not try to use its majority to pass the other three Bills – the Fiscal Transfers Bill, the Local Government (Amendment) Bill and the Municipal and District Councils (Amendment) Bill – because in due course it became apparent that if they did that and local government elections were subsequently held, the opposition would boycott these. As a consequence, local government elections were postponed yet again, and everyone turned their attention to the national and regional elections.
We now have new arrangements at the central government level, but the crisis in local government continues. The original principles behind the task force discussions were to create mechanisms to allow for the devolution of power from the centre to the various local government bodies, but in the end the PPP/C was not prepared for reform as fundamental as this, and neither was it open to a guaranteed system of fiscal transfers which did not depend on central government whim. It might be observed in passing that it was the last-mentioned in particular which allowed the previous administration to play irresponsible political games with the city authorities, whose inefficiencies apart, do not have sufficient funds at their disposal to maintain the capital.
According to what Minister of Local Government Ganga Persaud was reported as telling the Guyana Chronicle yesterday, the administration would like to see local government elections this year, but recognizes that the legislative issues would have to be addressed first. It can be inferred from his statements that he regards the two Bills which were passed in 2009 as a fait accompli, but it is likely that the opposition might not see them in that light, given that under the provisions of one the government would in effect control all the appointments to the Local Government Commission, and under the other the Minister has overweening power.
There is no doubt that all the parties would agree that local government elections need to be held as soon as is feasible, and one expects, therefore, that this would be one of the priorities on the tripartite agenda. One imagines too that the position of the combined opposition on the content of the legislation would not have changed much since the last parliament, although it remains to be seen whether the present government will adjust its views on control of local government to make a consensus possible.
The ruling party’s own circumstances have changed radically since the election, and from its new vantage point it may see the wisdom of greater democracy at the local level, and the need to give people more control over the affairs of their own district – including in areas like Georgetown where the opposition would probably secure a majority. The current failure of the various local authorities has been laid at the last government’s door, for the simple reason that it exerted complete control over senior appointments and discipline; it was the one with the power to install IMCs; and it held the purse strings. It is not even in its own interest for this situation to continue, more especially when it is considered that its lame attempts to lay all the blame for shortcomings in Georgetown’s administration (to give a prime example) on the powerless city council simply backfired; propaganda notwithstanding, citizens understood very well where the basic problem lay. New times require new approaches, and the government has an opportunity to take another look at the legislation in the interest of promoting real grass-roots democracy.
