Main opposition APNU yesterday accused the government of failing to lay the groundwork for the holding of long overdue local government elections, while calling the administration to halt its continuing campaign to impose partisan Interim Management Committees (IMCs) on communities.
At a news conference yesterday at the Office of the Leader of the Opposition on Hadfield Street, APNU MP Ronald Bulkan, who is the coalition’s spokesman on Local Government and Regional Development, accused the Donald Ramotar administration of hypocrisy.
Instead of making visible moves to facilitate the holding of local government elections, he charged, the administration has callously continued its campaign to dismantle duly-elected local government councils and replace them with IMCs, comprising largely of hand-picked loyalists and ignoring in the process even the most basic principle of proportionality. “Their acts are deliberately provocative and ought to be condemned by all right-thinking citizens,” said Bulkan.
Government and APNU representatives met on June 11 and agreed to reintroduce local government reform legislation before the parliamentary recess in August. “As of today, Friday 13th July 2012, the government has failed to submit the Bills to the National Assembly,” Bulkan said yesterday.
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 the legislation 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 on local government reform had not been incorporated into the proposed legislation.
Bulkan noted yesterday that despite the government’s repeated declarations about being committed to the early holding of the polls—due since 1997—it has dissolved Neighbourhood Democratic Councils (NDCs) and installed IMCs in Bartica, Canefield-Enterprise, Ordnance-Fort Lands 38, Enfield-New Doe Park, Kilcoy-Chesney, Maida-Tarlogie, Black Bush Polder, Bush Lot-Adventure, Whim-Bloomfield as well as the Corriverton Town Council.
The Local Government Ministry has put in train mechanisms to dismantle the Anna Regina Town Council and the NDCs at La Jalousie-Nouvelle Flanders, Little Diamond-Herstelling and Plaisance-Industry, he added, while noting that efforts to set up IMCs in Kwakwani and Lethem were resisted and rebuffed by residents there. (The Ireng/Sawariwau NDC in Lethem was dissolved yesterday. “It is clear, therefore, that we have moved beyond mischief and into the realm of wickedness,” Bulkan said, while saluting citizens of Corriverton and Anna Regina who have decided to fight back against the “undemocratic acts of the government.” He said APNU looks forward to see if their calls will be heeded.
In addition, Bulkan said APNU wished to alert the public to what is currently taking place at the Georgetown municipality, where he said the government is refusing to act in keeping with recommendations arising from an inquiry it commissioned. “Here again the objective is clearly to frustrate the council to support the government’s claim that it is ineffective/dysfunctional, so as to justify its replacement by a PPP IMC. APNU places this government on notice that they are threading on very dangerous ground,” he said.
Desmond Trotman, another APNU MP, said it seems as though the government wants to have power reside in the Minister [of Local Government] and not in the hands of the people. He noted that in some places people have been resisting the imposition of IMC.
Within the Local Govern-ment Election Amendment Act, Lance Carberry, former PNCR MP noted at the news conference, there is a clause that the Governmaent inserted to give the Local Government Minister the power to decide if and when elections will be held. As a result, he said that the opposition has worked with local communities to ensure they become conscious and ready to resist. “The people in the local communities must take responsibility for their daily lives,” he said.
Carberry added that with the eventual passage of the Fiscal Transfers Bill, transfers to local government authorities will not be at the discretion of the minister but will be a right enjoyed by those authorities.
Bulkan said that while the minister has the authority to extend the life of an IMC, the law is vague as regards the length of time that an IMC should be functioning. He said that it, however, does not mean that the life of an IMC must be prolonged.
During the meeting between government and APNU last month, Leader of the Opposition David Granger voiced his ire at what he said was government’s undermining of local democratic organs. At that meeting – the last one between government and opposition and from which the Alliance for Change had been excluded – Granger raised a number of issues, including the arbitrary transfer of neighbourhood democratic overseers, dissolution of NDCs and the installation of IMCs, the allocation of resources for Regional Democratic Councils and local government reforms and local government elections.
