Tomorrow, across the country, we will be voting in our Local Government Elections (LGEs), to take power closer to the people in Municipalities, Regional Democratic Councils (RDCs), National Democratic Councils (NDCs) and Amerindian Village Councils. The governing party at the Central level, the PPP, have made no bones about seeking to win as many of these local organs as they can – which is their democratic right. In fact, they have explicitly declared that, with these organs controlled by their personnel, relations will be much more collaborative, and, as such, more productive and beneficial for local residents.
As we have seen from our recent history, the Opposition used its control of these local governing bodies to oppose the Central Government even in projects beneficial to the local communities. For instance, consider the Opposition’s exploitation of the removal of squatters at Mocha in the path of a new Highway to connect the ECB to the EBD and CJIA. These squatters were given due notice; alternative house lots; alternative new housing; alternative new lands for farming and livestock; yet the Opposition leaders fomented a stand-off to force the Government to enforce the law and evict the squatters.
The reality is that all governments – including the PNC under Burnham and Hoyte, as well as the APNU/AFC – have evicted squatters in order to proceed with national development.
But the tenets of democracy – such as the need for an Opposition to keep the incumbents on their toes – is as applicable to the local as well as the central level. And at the local level, because of the closeness of the people to the representatives – who will invariably originate from their communities – the Opposition should be much more direct, because the issues will affect everyone directly. For instance, these voters will not be grappling with esoteric issues like monetary policy or liberalization of the financial system, but concrete challenges such as garbage collection or cleaning of drains. In the past, because the political parties did not give much attention to LGEs – focusing instead on General Elections for the Central Government – this led to the people also discounting their importance. Most residents might not have been able to even identify their local representatives.
The extraordinary efforts of the PPP to prevail in tomorrow’s LGE, however, for the first time has stirred a reciprocal interest in the people. The Opposition’s hysterical rearguard actions to prevent a massive PPP sweep of even their “strongholds” have ironically increased that interest. The people reason that, if the LGE were not important, the Opposition would not have come out so vehemently. This may have the unintended consequence of placing local government once more at the centre of the ordinary citizen’s interest.
As we all know, in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery, many ex-slaves bought complete abandoned estates like Victoria to create villages and lots from other estate owners to create what were then dubbed Proprietary Villages, like Den Amstel. The residents then organized themselves into Village Councils that managed the affairs of the villages and intermediated relations with the plantocracy and the Colonial Central Government. As such, democracy at the local level was introduced organically in Guyana by these Village Councils, and immeasurably helped the fight for full democracy in the ensuing century.
It is this interest in issues that affect residents locally that must be fostered again in all villages and NDCs. For the indentured labourers, who replaced the freed Africans on the sugar plantations, they were kept outside of politics into the modern post WWII era because the majority of them continued living in the plantations’ “logies”. Housing Settlements intended to keep them near the plantations to provide their labour were paternalistically run by appointed “overseers”. Even when extra-nuclear housing schemes through a SILWF facility were initiated in the 1950s, Village Councils were not created, and the residents generally did not experience this democratic imperative.
It is quite likely that after this LGE, government of the people will become a reality.
