Deep Decentralisation to extend autonomy

Local Government Elections (LGEs) are due next year, and while most might be sulking at not receiving the now presumably obligatory Christmas cash grant and making do with what they have for Christmas, it might be useful to reappraise the effectiveness of Local Government’s 70 NDCs and 10 municipalities with 1220 council seats that are supposed to bring governance closer to the people.
Following the Constitutional Reform process in 1999-2000 (precipitated by violent street protests and ethnic violence by the PNC), the PPP and PNC instituted a Special Committee on Local Government Reform to devolve more autonomy than in the 1980 constitutional adumbrations on local Government.  It took 16 years for five new pieces of legislation—the Local Authorities (Elections) (Amendment) Act 2009, the Municipal And District Councils (Amendment) Act 2013, the Fiscal Transfers Act 2013, the Local Government Commission Act 2013 and the Local Government (Amendment) Act 2015 – to establish new parameters.
With local Government elections concededly held rather spasmodically since 2016, we yet have some experience with our present legal framework for some opinions to be formed on realising the goals articulated for the process: greater powers placed in the hands of the people under the principle of subsidiarity. That is, in matters of governance, it stipulates that decisions be made at the lowest practical level. The essential question is whether the present system facilitates this ideal. The answer has to be a resounding “No!” based on the reality that even local issues like bridges between villages, for instance, have to be addressed by Central Government Ministers and even the President.  The challenge arises because the framers parsed local Government only in terms of “decentralisation”, where power still emanates from a “centre”, from which it is expected to flow outwards. However, in all jurisdictions, this almost never occurs without constitutional stipulations to ensure it does, by demarcating the “competencies” between central and local Governments.
While most Guyanese are sceptical of the word “federalism” that describes such a governance structure because a misguided call for “partition” back in the sixties is somehow associated with it, we need a mechanism to ensure that local power is not defenestrated by central Government. Call it what you will, but unless the powers or “competencies” of the local entities are constitutionally delineated, protected and not subject to alteration except by mutual agreement, the central Government will inevitably poach and encroach. Power is rarely conceded voluntarily. Maybe, as was suggested to the 2015 “Steering Committee on Constitutional Reform”, the arrangement to entrench separate competencies be dubbed “Deep Devolution”.
An alternative suggestion might be a pre-1980 reversion for “local Government” to go below the NDC’s and start with the Village Councils – a unique Guyanese contribution to democracy.  This is in consonance with the modern notion of “subsidiarity”. After the abolition of slavery, the freed Africans established several villages on their own initiative. They created village councils to run the affairs of their communities, and these councils were the incubators of much of the leadership in the African community, forming their links to the county and national Governments. The councils, through their various committees such as drainage etc., were able to develop local expertise in managing organisations. Funding and a recalcitrant central Government were their “bêtes noires”.
Villages formed outside the ambit of the sugar plantations by time-expired Indian indentured labourers on rented land did not establish village councils. And this was also true when all of the remaining logies were cleared in the fifties and sixties to create “Extranuclear Housing Schemes”. To an extent far greater than the African community, these and the new massive explosion in housing areas in the last few decades are deficient in the mechanics of running and organising their local affairs. For historical reasons, the Indigenous villages are better equipped.
Any revival of the Village Movement in other parts of Guyana will have to be accompanied by an intensive non-political programme of education in the running of these bodies coupled with stipulated funding based on population and delineated competencies. The communities would then be in a position to reap the spin-off benefits: citizens organising for cooperation via the ties of affinity rather than the coercive ethos of the state, as is the present dispensation.