Government and A Partner-ship for National Unity (APNU) met on Monday and agreed to reintroduce local government reform legislation before the parliamentary recess in August even as the Leader of the Opposition continues to voice his displeasure at what he said is government’s undermining of local democratic organs.
The meeting took place at the Office of the President to the exclusion of the Alliance For Change, which yesterday accused the Government of not communicating properly with the party.
In a statement on the meeting yesterday, Leader of the Opposition David Granger declared that the local government system was in crisis. He was commenting on the recent installation of Interim Management Committees. Granger said that residents were not being consulted and that local democracy was being trampled upon with little regard being shown for regional and neighbourhood tiers of government.
APNU’s team of Granger, Member of Parliament Joseph Harmon, and Member of Parliament Deborah Backer met with President Donald Ramotar, Prime Minister Sam Hinds, Head of the Presiden-tial Secretariat Dr. Roger Luncheon and Presidential Adviser on Governance Gail Teixeira.
At the meeting, the Leader of the Opposition raised a number of issues, including the arbitrary transfer of neighbourhood democratic overseers, dissolution of Neighbourhood Democratic Councils and the installation of Interim Management Committees, the allocation of resources for Regional Democratic Councils Deme-rara – Mahaica, Region 4 and local government reforms and local government elections.
The two sides agreed that bills related to local government reform would be reintroduced in the National Assembly before the August 10 recess so that progress could be made towards holding of local government elections.
During the Ninth Parlia-ment, a package of five local government bills went to a Select Committee. However in 2009, the government used its majority to pass two of them – the Local Authorities (Elections) (Amendment) Bill and the Local Government Commission Bill.
To this the Opposition objected as it had been agreed by all the parliamentary parties that they should have been passed as a package.
Thereafter, the combined opposition 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.
According to the APNU statement yesterday, the Alliance For Change was invited to the talks but did not attend. However, contacted yesterday, a member of the AFC said that the party received notification that the meeting was in progress and questioned why the AFC’s representatives were not present.
The representative said that the Government did not send out a proper invitation to the party hence its absence from the meeting. “They did not give us any final confirmation of that meeting because the last thing we heard is that they were trying to reach representatives of AFC,” said the AFC source.
“We found it strange that they would choose to send an email 20 minutes after the meeting had started instead of calling to see where the AFC representatives were,” said the person from the AFC.
In a comment to this newspaper, Member of Parliament for the AFC Khemraj Ramjattan said, “I got an email from Teixeira saying that she had had no response yet from APNU. She did not get back to me about APNU so I didn’t bother going to the meeting,” he said. He said that some time later he received an email from Teixeira saying that the meeting was in progress and asking why he was not there. “I said that I didn’t know that the meeting was on. I said I hope you had a successful meeting,” Ramjattan said. Efforts by Stabroek News to make contact with Teixeira yesterday proved futile.
Ramjattan said that chief among the issues that he wanted to deal with in the meeting is the move by the Government to the courts with regard to the budget cuts, calling it nonsensical. “Just as how the President can use his presidential veto, we could use the parliamentary veto,” Ramjattan said in opposition to the argument being put forward by the government that the budget cuts were unconstitutional.
