I began this discourse on local government reform with the contention that elitist behaviour in this kind of matter has not served us well, and the events in the National Assembly last Thursday have reinforced this. Put simply, it must have been realised that, Member’s Day or not, attempting to question the government’s traditional right to set the order of business in the National Assembly would have been controversial.
Can someone please explain to me why, if local government reform and elections are as important as all the parties claim they are, the opposition sought the passing of the bills in a context that involved questioning the government’s right to set the parliamentary agenda? The PPP/C and the opposition are involved in some kind of a tug of war over both sets of bills. Rather than courting controversy and thus providing the regime with a reasonable excuse for not supporting the bills, would they not have had a better chance of passing if the opposition had simply voted against the hydro project bills and left the PPP/C, if it so chose, to expose its anti-local government position?
The above deviation aside, perhaps because of its ideological lineage, the PPP/C, more than any other political party in Guyana, subscribes to the notion of an omnipotent and omnipresent centralised government vis-à-vis its citizens, and this orientation has no place in modern state management and particularly in our kind of a society. In the area of local democracy, which is my focus at present, we should seek every possible opportunity to institute meaningful autonomous community governance.
For clarity, let me make two points. Firstly, I am not stating that the central executive is not still one of the most important national political organisations. Make no mistake; local government reforms and elections alone will make little difference if equitability at the central level is questionable.
However, the pressures of globalisation have severely diminished both its internal and external capacities, and one internal expression of this has been that more educated and connected populations are increasingly demanding and winning greater control over more and more aspects of their lives.
Secondly, while we may intellectually understand and perhaps even accept the general need for greater community control, the difficulty arises at the practical level of grasping the vicissitudes of our unique condition and conceptualising and establishing the institutional requirements. Where this understanding is absent, we tend to proceed and hope that the traditional arrangements will somehow become liberating or we condemn the liberal content of these traditional processes as inappropriate and for example, strive for dominance, i.e. the institutionalisation of a more dictatorial environment.
The struggle for independence and representative government in the 1950s and 1960s brought with it the demand by the populace for greater involvement in the management of local affairs, and last week I concluded with reference to the Marshall Report on local government. Dr. Marshall was a product of the period of state centricity and of the Westminster political culture, which was also – at that time if much less today – much more state centric and his recommendations therefore, though progressive at the time, must be viewed within that context.
Marshall held that local government was “central to the operation of a modern democratic state and if properly organised harnesses local enthusiasm; teaches both electors and elected their civic duties; trains politicians and officials destined to play important parts in the wider sphere of national government; avoids bureaucratic government; gives practice in the use of power; encourages community mindedness; avoids the expensive alternative of doing the local work by a series of separate outposts of the central department; and provides the means by which stable local government can continue irrespective of political convulsions at the centre.” (Marshall, A H (1955) “Report on Local Government in British Guyana,” London)
Although the British government accepted Marshall’s Report, implementation was stymied by the struggle for political power in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which succeeded in destabilising the first PPP government and establishing the PNC in power.
It was not until 1969, after independence was already won, that a major attempt was made at local government reform. In that year the Local Authorities (Elections) Act and the Valuation for Rating Purposes Act were passed. Boundaries of some villages were extended to include unorganised areas, Georgetown and New Amsterdam were extended and another three towns were created, etc. Local government elections, which had not been held since 1959, took place in 1970.
In 1973, the regional system was introduced and regional ministers took the place of the all- powerful district commissioners. In 1977, the Regional Development Authorities Act gave the minister powers to designate any area in Guyana a Development Authority with the purpose of stimulating development, maintaining the infrastructure, providing adequate housing for the settlement of persons and promoting the development of cooperatives, etc.
Of course, both the expectations and institutions were and are still located within the ambit of the all-imposing state. For example, section 13 of the 1945 Local Government Act, as repeatedly amended states that: “The Minister shall have and may exercise in any village or country district any or all of the powers of a local authority whenever it appears to the Minister expedient so to do, and may exercise any or all of those powers in any of those districts, whether there is or is not a local authority thereof.” On rating, section 54(2) states “If, after discussing and, if necessary, altering and amending the estimate and the rate proposed, the local authority by a majority of votes agrees upon an estimate and a rate, such estimate and rate shall be transmitted to the Minister for approval, and the Minister may approve of them either in their entirety or subject to such changes as he may think fit.”
The Municipal and District Councils Act of 1969, as amended, is similarly restrictive of local democracy and much of the quarrel between the City Council and the Ministry of Local Government is rooted in this highly centralised structure.
As we now know, even the high- minded rhetoric of the 1980 reforms has led nowhere. Our condition is not normal and any attempt to treat it so in structuring a local government system would be sub-optimal and inevitably result in the shattering of expectations.
henryjeffrey@yahoo.com
