There was little that was either new or shocking about the revelations contained in the Kennard City Hall Commission of Inquiry Report. Given precedent, what is more important than what Justice Kennard had to say is just where all that will lead in the context of corrective action. Frankly, and we would dearly wish to be proven wrong, there is no good reason to be optimistic as things stand. With City Hall the more things have changed the more they have remained the same.
There is something wearisome about City Hall in the manner that it so graphically mirrors incompetence. What is tiresome, too, is the manner in which we remain prisoners of the municipality’s overwhelming underperformance, saddled as we are with an administration that continues to demonstrate not only its inability to manage with anything even remotely resembling a modicum of competence but also a difficulty in evading the dead hand of party politics in pursuit of its functions.
Not too many years ago there had been vigorous and prolonged attempts – that had even attracted attention and comment from sections of the diplomatic community – to lead us to believe that Local Government Elections would be the silver bullet that would bring an end to the preponderance of inertia, indifference, administrative incompetence and corruption that had become the hallmarks of urban municipal administration, all of which were taking place within the framework of a politically muscle-bound Council whose priorities never really seemed to have a great deal to do with the welfare of the capital. In a sense it is amazing how quickly that notion has taken flight.
Truth be told the pronouncement emanating from the Kennard Commission of Inquiry to the effect that much of the leadership at City Hall comprised varying degrees of incompetence, indifference and inertia made no great public waves not because the observations were not consistent with the truth but because a point had already been reached where, when it came to public perceptions of the performance on the municipality, it would have taken a great deal more than what Justice Kennard had to say to shock us.
In the matter of the performance of the Town Clerk Justice Kennard went further, recommending that King, the de facto CEO at City Hall be ‘brought before a disciplinary tribunal………” for acting “outside the scope and intent of the law on several occasions”.
So that it is not just the Town Clerk but the entire management machinery at City Hall that stands ‘indicted’ by Justice Kennard’s pronouncements, made embarrassingly pointed by the fact that where criticisms of the performances of some of City Hall’s senior ‘players’ are concerned he opted to identify the personages themselves, by designation, so that we are not left guessing as to who they are.
There is, as well, the absurd pantomime that passes for solid waste management in the capital. At the heart of this is the seeming inability of the municipality to meet its garbage disposal bills and the quixotic manner in which it has opted to ‘manage’ the crisis, ‘chopping and changing” the existing contractual arrangements to embrace new players whilst remaining unable to discharge its multi-million dollar debt to its main service providers.
With City Hall’s Civil Service having been, for the most part, humbled, even miniaturized by the ‘verdict’ on its performance by the Kennard Commission of Inquiry, it is the political players on the Council that now appear to be tugging the strings in the garbage disposal issue. Monies made available by central government to ‘bail out’ City Hall for the second time in successive years are yet, as far as we are aware, to be paid to the garbage disposal contractors. It seems, as well, that new players are being recruited in order to break what the Council see as a monopoly enjoyed by the main players. All of this, City Hall hopes, will shield it from a repeat of the preceding garbage crises when the main service providers have withdrawn their services. Justice Kennard would appear to be saying that better outcomes, all round, will only come from heightened levels of administrative competence and integrity.
The bigger picture, of course, has to do with salvaging the administration of the capital. The Town Clerk, frankly, stands discredited, seemingly seriously compromised by the charges pointed at him, directly, by the Report, of the COI, not least, those that have to do with contracts that were awarded to “friends and associates”. His own future as head of the City’s administration would now appear to be in doubt.
The plot is still unfolding though, surely, enough has been bared to make clear the depth of the dilemma and to underscore the reality of the failed governance system that has, in a host of ways, compromised Georgetown and its environs. It is now, it seems, a question, perhaps of fashioning a new and different kind of governance template for administering Georgetown, the existing one having failed so thoroughly. A capital city, after all, is the municipality exercising primary status in a country, its first face and usually its seat of government. In our particular instance, it deserves a far superior quality of governance to that which it has been afforded up to this time. That is where local government reform should be heading.
