Whenever, as he frequently did, President Jagdeo pronounced on the desirability of hastening the holding of local government elections, those pronouncements usually coincided with a crisis at City Hall. More than that, his interventions always appeared designed to accentuate the extent of the crises, to establish a nexus between the city’s woes and the incumbent municipal administration and to state that the remedy reposed in the removal of the council, particularly Mayor Hamilton Green.
Last week the Ramotar administration passed up its first opportunity to chart a different course in its dealings with City Hall. First, Local Government Minister Ganga Persaud then the entire cabinet, according to NCN radio, declared that blame for the state of the city must be laid at the door of Mayor Hamilton Green; that was a matter of days after Mr Green had trotted out another of his familiar excuses for the garbage crisis in the city – something about the inoperable state of the equipment used by a private contractor in the refuse collection exercise.
Mayor Green’s administration may have long made its own case for exiting City Hall, permanently. That apart it lives on borrowed time – more than ten years of it. Not everyone, however, shares the government’s view that culpability for the shameful state to which our capital has been reduced over time reposes entirely in Mr Green’s administration or, for that matter, that the departure of the incumbents will usher in a radical transformation in the state of the city. Indeed, there might even be a persuasive argument for suggesting that Mr Jagdeo’s chosen approach to his administration’s engagements with City Hall, to say nothing about the coarseness of his own style, has contributed in generous measure to the present plight of the capital.
With Mr Jagdeo and his administration it always appeared to be a matter of putting politics first. That much was evidenced in the sentiment expressed by his then Local Government Minister Kellawan Lall some time ago to the effect that the outbreak of a pandemic in the city might be just what it would take to get rid of the city council. Reckless and churlish in the extreme, the utterance appeared to take its cue from the posture that had long been adopted by Mr Jagdeo, a quixotic posture which, at one extreme, favoured ‘taking apart’ the Mayor and the municipal administration over the state of the city, and, at the other, releasing tranches of money to the cash-strapped council in gestures intended to appear magnanimous but which always came across as designed to rub City Hall’s nose in the dirt of its failure.
It was, too, a posture that appeared designed to keep the city just above the point of drowning rather than salvaging it altogether. Mr Jagdeo, it appears, never lost sight of the fact that while it would not have been to his political advantage to let the capital ‘go under’ to piles of garbage, clogged waterways, potholed roads and a host of other deficiencies, it was not in his administration’s interest to provide the council with the level of support that would have altered the public perception of Mayor Green and his administration as one that had caused the city to sink into a state of near ruin in the first place.
One might argue that Mr Jagdeo’s attitude towards Mayor Green and his council was influenced by a desire to ensure its removal without unnecessary delay and to ensure its replacement with a PPP/C-led council. That is all well and good except of course to enquire as to whether Mr Jagdeo, as head of government, ought not to have embraced a far nobler motive. He might have, for example, supported City Hall by adding his voice to its call for the business community to attend to the payment of its rates and taxes with greater alacrity and to change its garbage-disposal regime that continues to leave the streets and parapets strewn with the remains of the trading day. There are other ways in which the Jagdeo administration might have helped too. It could have thrown its weight behind City Hall’s admittedly only half-hearted efforts to bring a sense of order to trading in the city and might even have considered providing expertise to support City Hall’s debt-collection department, whose utter ineptitude was exposed in the Report of the Burrowes Commission of Enquiry. On top of all this the government could have been less tardy in the payment of its own rates and taxes.
A posture of genuine magnanimity might have benefited Mr Jagdeo, his political administration and the city in at least two distinct ways. It might have done much more to place the spotlight on the ineptitude of City Hall and to give the government an imaging-enhancing boost ahead of local government elections, whenever those are held, bearing in mind that the elections simply cannot be delayed for much longer. Add to that the fact that the Jagdeo administration would have been seen to be making a sincere and considerable contribution to sparing the city the woes which it has endured, and City Hall would have been confronting an even worse image crisis, one which, arguably, might even have forced it out of office.
The 2009 Burrowes Commission of Enquiry appeared to be yet another attempt by Mr Jagdeo to place the spotlight on the inadequacies of City Hall and that it clearly did by pointing to a host of operational irregularities and inefficiencies including a chronic lack of accountability in the management of the city’s finances, performance deficiencies at the highest levels of the municipal civil service, operational practices unattended by laid-down procedures, a culture of unilateral decision-making, non-existent debt-collection routines and staff whose dispositions to their jobs continued to be affected by low morale arising out of late payment of salaries.
While the completion of the Burrowes Commission of Enquiry provided further incontrovertible evidence – if indeed such were needed – that City Hall had completely lost its way, the Jagdeo administration appeared not to have had a great deal of interest in embracing its recommendations. True, Commission Chairman Keith Burrowes did attempt to provide a measure of support for City Hall by lending some amount of attention to remedying some of the deficiencies that had been uncovered in the enquiry including those that had to do with administrative and financial management and the creation of a more efficient debt collection system. Burrowes, however, would have needed a considerable level of official support for such a demanding undertaking and whether or not he actually got that support is questionable. Once again, the Jagdeo administration appeared to be saying that it was more concerned with shaming Mayor Green’s administration and keeping it in a weakened state than with helping to remedy the problems of the city. While, for example, the government appeared to revel in the scandal that followed the completion of the Burrowes Commission Report which forced both the Town Clerk and the City Treasurer out of office, it never demonstrated any real willingness to help or assist in the process of helping the municipality recover from that situation. It might be noted too in this context, that under the current law, the power to discipline or remove senior officials of the municipality lies not with the city council, but with the Minister of Local Government. Despite constant criticism over the years about the inefficiencies of the M&CC, however, government took no action against errant officers until after the Burrowes report appeared.
The question that arises is whether the Ramotar administration can or will take a different approach to the problems of the city while, of course, not necessarily losing sight of its political objective of removing the incumbent municipal administration. Since that can only come through the holding of local government elections it is the hastening of that process with which the government must be principally concerned. Meanwhile, and for the sake of the city, President Ramotar must cause his administration to shift from the counterproductive posture of his predecessor and to foster a relationship with the municipality that sets parochial politics aside and puts the capital first.
