A government afraid of its own democracy

Nov 05, 2025 News, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – There is always something faintly comical, and therefore tragic, about governments pretending to be democratic. They love the trappings—the elections, the slogans, the photographs of ministers surrounded by smiling citizens—but they cannot bear the thing itself.

It demands humility, trust, and the surrender of power. The People’s Progressive Party/Civic government has mastered the performance but not the principle. It speaks of local democracy, but it does not believe in it. It has confused management for governance, and control for competence. And so, its grand local government plans are already doomed, not by opposition, not by inefficiency, but by its own fear of letting go.

Over the past five years, the PPP/C has perfected a system of benevolent authoritarianism disguised as development. Everything must flow from the centre every project, every dollar, every dream. The government does not partner with communities; it dispenses to them, like a lord tossing alms to peasants. It prefers to rebuild community roads directly through its ministries rather than work through the local bodies created precisely for that purpose.

Neighborhood Democratic Councils (NDCs) are treated not as organs of governance, but as administrative inconveniences, useful only when pliant, expendable when not. There is a word for this: centralization. And there is a consequence: decay.

In the villages and wards where NDCs exist only on paper, people have learned the new etiquette of dependency. When the drains flood or the roads disintegrate, they no longer appeal to their councils; they appeal to the minister. They know the council has no money, little machinery, no meaning. It is a ghost—starved of funds, stripped of autonomy, reduced to begging for the government’s yearly subventions. The councils can neither raise sufficient rates and taxes nor keep the little they collect without central approval. Yet instead of helping them become self-reliant, the government prefers to keep them on fiscal life support by handing out subventions.

It is all very logical, if you accept the logic of control. A weak NDC is a manageable NDC. A dependent region is a grateful one. The government does not want strong local institutions; it wants obedient ones. So, it builds dependency into the system, and then complains that the system does not work.

The contradiction is almost elegant in its simplicity. The government declares that it wants strong local governance but does everything to ensure that power never leaves Georgetown. It preaches community empowerment but cannot abide the thought of communities acting without its direction. It champions participation but only on the condition that participation means applause. The result is not democracy, but a carefully staged production of governance where the script is written in central government.

This, more than anything, is why its local government agenda will fail. Not because the idea of reform is wrong, but because the impulse behind it is insincere. Real local democracy requires trust that communities can manage their own affairs, that mistakes will be made and corrected without ministerial supervision, that people can learn by doing.

But trust is a rare commodity in the PPP/C’s political culture. Its instinct is domination, not democracy. It does not see citizens; it sees clients. It does not see councils; it sees committees waiting for instructions. Its vision of governance is paternal: government as provider, people as recipients.

The tragedy is that Guyana cannot modernize under such a philosophy. No country ever did. Local government is the foundation of civic competence, the school in which citizens learn self-government. But when the councils are denied both responsibility and resources, they become weak and helpless. The government, in its arrogance, is recreating the very colonial structures it once condemned: power concentrated in the capital, the peripheries kept docile with subventions.

It will not matter who is appointed Minister of Local Government. The failure is systemic, not personal. Ministers come and go; the machinery of control remains. The new minister may tour the regions, pose for photographs with councillors—but without real fiscal autonomy, without the power to raise and retain their own revenues, the NDCs will remain crippled. And in the end, the government will complain again that local bodies are ineffective and must therefore be bypassed, thus completing the circle of futility it has so carefully drawn.

It is all depressingly familiar. Guyana has had this conversation before. Every government promises reform, devolution, empowerment—and every government, once in office, discovers that power tastes too sweet to share. The rhetoric of democracy always yields to the reflex of control.

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

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• Democracy, Government, NDCs, Peeping Tom, PPP/C

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