Stabroek News has invited the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C), A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) and the Alliance for Change to submit a weekly column on local government and related matters. The PPP/C has declined the offer. Only APNU has submitted a column this week.
Guyanese citizens have been waiting for seventeen years to elect new councillors to six municipalities and sixty-five neighbourhood democratic councils. Elections are important because they are a democratic, constitutional right. Most councils that were democratically elected in 1994 have been replaced by government-appointed members and have become dysfunctional.
Local Government is a vital level of public administration because it deals with people’s daily lives, in their communities. Elections should be held every three years to allow people to democratically elect their representatives to govern their communities but these have not been taking place. Elections are essential because the entire local government system is rotten and must be rehabilitated and made fully functional. Normal local administration has been paralysed.
At the heart of the urban and rural development crisis is the question of who wields power in the municipal and neighbourhood councils. There must be change at the local level if Guyana is to become a more equal and inclusive society and a less unbalanced and undemocratic state. The People’s Progressive Party/Civic – PPP/C – administration, for over two decades, 
has demonstrated its reluctance to introduce the type of root-and-branch local government reforms that could lead to greater inclusionary democracy.
Reforms are essential to give effect to the Constitution of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana which states, at Article 12: “Local Government by freely elected representatives of the people is an integral part of the democratic organisation of the State.” It states, further, at Article 13, “The principal objective of the political system of the state is to establish an inclusionary democracy by providing increasing opportunities for the participation of citizens and their organisations in the management and decision-making processes of the state with particular emphasis on those areas of decision-making that directly affect their well-being.”
The PPP/C administration has shown little interest in empowering the people to enable them to exercise greater control over their daily lives. The PPP/C is more concerned with concentrating power in the hands of its appointed Ministers of Local Government and Regional Development. They have undermined democratically-elected local councils and underdeveloped communities by impeding the provision of public services to residents. The neighbourhood and municipal councils ― starved of funding ― have been unable to meet their statutory needs thereby making them ineffectual. This has led to a near-total breakdown in local governance.
Local problems ― broken bridges; clogged canals, culverts, drains, gutters and trenches; flooding; overgrown cemeteries, playfields and parapets; potholed roads; stray dogs and roaming cattle; lack of adequate street lighting; lack of public spaces for entertainment, leisure, sport and recreation; lack of efficient solid waste disposal and lack of enforcement of building and zoning codes – combine to make many neighbourhoods unsanitary, unpleasant and unsafe.
PPP/C ministers of Local Government and Regional Development during the past decade have set out to deliberately demolish numerous local democratic councils, although not without resistance. Residents are resentful of the PPP/C’s undemocratic tactics.
The PPP/C is satisfied with the ‘old’ system under which its ministers have been able to remove elected councils and impose hand-picked replacements. This is the reason for the collapse of councils in municipalities and neighbourhoods. The independence and integrity of democratically-elected local councils have been undermined in order to maintain complete central control of the councils.
President Donald Ramotar and the PPP/C administration are procrastinating. They rejected calls from the ambassadors and high commissioners of the USA, UK, Canada and the European Union for the holding of local government elections. The diplomats had stated, jointly, in 2013, “Given the important and pressing need for effective local governance, we believe that 2013 should be a watershed moment for the people of Guyana – the year they can once again democratically elect their local government…the institutions and practice of local governance have withered on the vine.”
Some foreign missions, together with local, non-governmental organisations, again, in 2014, issued a joint statement expressing their collective hope that local government elections would be held by 1st August 2014.
They declared, among other things, “…the legislative foundation is in place for elections by August 1. The election machinery is ready. The political parties have reaffirmed their desire to hold local elections and are making campaign preparations. It is therefore our hope ― as the PPP/C, APNU, and AFC pledged in their 2011 election manifestos ― that local government elections will be held, “bringing much needed reinvigoration into local government entities.” That is something all parties and civic stakeholders should agree on in 2014.”
