Local Government Elections will solve nothing

Apr 16, 2023 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – If the Opposition boycotts Local Government Elections – a remote and unrealistic possibility – scheduled for June 12^th this year, the PPPC is going to be in some serious ‘shaving cream’. The PPPC knows this all too well and is keeping its fingers crossed and hoping that tomorrow the PNCR or APNU or some incarnation of the two turn up for Nomination Day.

If  per chance the Opposition does not compete in Local Government Elections, the PPPC would be unable to muster the human resources to effectively administer the municipalities and neighborhood democratic councils (NDCs) controlled by the main Opposition. The talent is simply not there and even at present the political parties have to scrape the barrel to find personnel to manage those bodies.

Whatever happens tomorrow, Local Government Elections will not change a thing. Nor would reforming the system – another distant possibility – have any effect. You can devolve, delegate or designate whatever powers you want to whatever levels you desire, it is not going to change anything unless there are the human and financial resources to make the system work.

Guyana is abysmally short of human resources.  The personnel with the skills and most importantly with the time and commitment are simply not available in the numbers needed.

Of all of the country’s leaders, David Granger demonstrated the greatest willingness of to make Local Government Elections work. He was prepared to have local government elections and to have them when scheduled – as he did in 2016 and 2018. And he was prepared to have these elections even though he probably knew that his party would take a hiding.

In the end, Local Government Elections got him and his government nowhere. And that was because the talent pool was not there, the financial resources was not there and the people were not that smitten with local democracy.

One of the reasons why local democracy does not work is because the scarcity of financial resources. This makes most local democratic organs highly dependent on central government financing.

Central government loves nothing better than to control and dominate. Just recently, there was an announcement that the government was going to take over the rehabilitation of city markets. But by what authority did the government make such a decision. And why did it feel that the city’s municipality is simply going to roll over and allow the government to assume control over the rehabilitation of the markets?

The revenue base of the town councils and municipalities are too slender to allow for the provision of effective services. Residential property owners who pay a pittance in rates and taxes to local organs are not supportive of paying market rates for the services they receive. And to add to this, there is high rate of delinquency, a factor contributed to by poor revenue collection and billing systems.

Anyone who has gone to City Hall in Georgetown to pay rates and taxes would recognize that it takes on average about 15 minutes to deal with every ratepayer. This is too much time. But when you compound this by at time only having one of two cashiers to deal with a municipality of tens of thousands of properties, its shows why rate collection is so poor. People don’t look forward to having to go and sit and play musical chairs and wait for a few hours just to pay a few thousands of dollars in rates and taxes.

The problem however goes much deeper. Local government is incompatible with our central political system. At the central level there is acute political and ethnic polarization. All that Local Government Elections do is to transfer that polarization to the local level. And this is one of the main reasons why the system is so dysfunctional and why local government elections will not solve anything.

What the country’s needs is stronger and effective central governance. The core needs stronger leadership and management. Guyana is small enough for there to be one central government that should be capable to administering the various tiers of government – national, regional and local.

One person has said that government should be run as a business. But if government was run as a business rather than like a cake-shop, things would be much better. Central government would have been able to do much of the work that is now done at the local level. In fact, if you examine closely the hundreds of roads which are being built across the country, this has been a centrally-directed exercise, showing that in the end centralized power is far more effective than local democracy… at least in so far as Guyana is concerned.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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• June, Local Government Elections, Nomination, Peeping Tom, PPPC

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