The defanged Georgetown mayor

Apr 13, 2013 Editorial

The more one looks at the running of the Georgetown municipality the more one recognizes that local government in Guyana is just another area of central government control. It has also not escaped notice that the government is insisting on controlling just about every aspect of national life.
In other countries the mayor is the person who has jurisdiction over his municipality. He determines the running of the municipality. Its revenue collection is his preserve to the extent that any organization or entity that operates in the city is beholden to the municipality.
Municipalities are self-governing; they have their own police whom they pay. They are responsible for the various tolls and penalties. Lands within the municipality are there to be managed as the municipality sees fit.
But when we come to Guyana we find that the mayor is merely a titular figurehead’ someone who presides at functions and one who has no power. Perhaps this may be so because the various mayors never operated as though they are autonomous.
There is an old saying, “What you don’t use, you lose.” If the mayors of yesteryear had power and refused to use that power then they would have lost it. The City Police is the most denuded in the history of municipal police anywhere in the world. There have been cases where the members of the city police arresting and detaining people who infringe the law only to have central government intervene to overturn the decision.
One case in point involved a contractor who undertook works in the city, ostensibly at the behest of the central government. The city council was not notified so the mayor quite correctly, concluded that the works were illegal. He moved to detain the contractor. The detention was short-lived; Central Government intervened and reduced the mayor to a meddlesome individual.
More recently, the city council has been discussing ways of enhancing its revenue base. The government has actually told the city council that it will do no such thing. The town clerk is a tool of the Minister of Local Government and therefore not beholden to any decision that the city council may take.
The casual onlooker may quite easily conclude that the city council is a department of the government and a poorly supported department at that. From time to time the government proclaims that it has to come repeatedly to the rescue of the city council. A few years ago, the then President Bharrat Jagdeo started a programme that paid sanitation workers a monthly stipend to work in their neighbourhoods. This programme, as expected, went nowhere after two or three months.
City Hall sees all the heavy duty equipment rolling along its streets after leaving the wharves that adorn the waterfront. Indeed, the council should have been collecting a fee on each heavy duty piece; instead, the money goes into the coffers of the central government.
Georgetown is home to the major businesses; it attracts the greatest number of Guyanese at any one time and with each citizen comes a piece of discarded material which is deposited either on the streets or into the waterways. These must be removed at a cost to city hall.
There was a plan to levy a tax on the import of those disposable food containers and the various plastic receptacles that are discarded in the city. The government collects this tax instead of city hall. Today, the council is being blamed for all the woes it has encountered but there is no consideration that the council is not allowed to manage its business.
It is pointless to look at the operations of municipalities outside of this country because one would argue that the legislation is different. But there are some basic things that govern the operations of municipalities. One of them is autonomy. In Guyana that goes through the window. The power resides in a Minister.
It is the same with just about every aspect of national life. In the field of communication, rather than an independent authority there is Ministerial control. In the security sector there is Ministerial control and even in the immigration sector there is Ministerial control.
Small wonder that Georgetown is in the mess it is; too much political control.

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