Shadow Minister of Communities, Ganga Persaud in his presentation to Parliament during the 2017 Budget Debate yesterday said the March, 2016 Local Government Elections are still incomplete.
He pointed out that there are still six areas in the country in which the Guyana Elections Commission has failed to resolve those elections.
He noted that “there is one constituency in Region Six where there is a tie and up to now the people there do not have a representative.”
Ganga added: “The imposition by the Minister of Communities, the imposition of Mayor of the Township of Mabaruma, the imposition of chairpersons in those ties NDCs is still engaging the attention of the court…,” he said.
He has heard that a number of new Local Authority Areas would be activated and he asked to correct the minister that these areas were demarcated a long time ago.
“These areas were not activated because there are certain criteria that must be met before an area is activated as a Local Authority area,” Persaud said. “I hope the honourable minister [Ronald Bulkan] would be able to tell us as to what revenue stream would be establishing these new Local Government areas to cause these people to be able to function as a unit.”
He questioned the relationship between the Regional Democratic Councils and the new townships and noted that they have “serious difficulties. The Ministry of Communities would have instructed, sir, the RDCs to hand over certain assets to the municipalities. That is an area that would be contested, sir and that is not right.”
He told the National Assembly that the imposition of the minister with the Regional Executive Officers has been creating serious problems in the Regional Democratic Council governance.
He was pleased when two speakers from the government side of the House, John Adams and Jennifer Wade spoke on Tuesday with passion about how much work was done in the PPP/C-controlled areas of regions 3 and 5 respectively.
He told the Speaker that if the REOs were working with these RDCs in the right manner, a lot more could have been achieved in those regions.
He said the 10 regions received an overall allocation of 15.4 percent from the budget, “less than what the social sector received, what the general administration got and less than what the infrastructure sector got…”
In his rebuttal, Minister Bulkan told the speaker that he wished to clarify that an offer was made to the opposition regarding the area where there were ties in the six Local Authority areas.
The offer, he said, was to honour the democratic principles whereby the party obtaining the greater number of votes in the tied areas would be entitled to the chairmanship.
He pointed out that records would show that the opposition refused the offer and that it led to the lack of resolution and the necessity and need for him as the subject minister to “name the mayor, in the case of Mabaruma and the chairs in the other regions.”
The minister also rebutted Persaud’s claim about no representation in a Local Authority area in Region Six, saying that the council represents the entire area. He lamented that if a councilor is absent it does not mean that the constituency is denied representation.
