The resignation of Local Government Minister Ganga Persaud came out of left field. Of all the ministers who sit around the cabinet table, he would have been the last one the political cognoscenti would have picked as likely to leave the government at this point. Even the Minister’s own PPP/C colleagues in the House during Thursday’s sitting appeared taken by surprise, so the least that can be said is that Minister Persaud was not disposed to have his departure discussed in larger party circles before it was officially announced. And somewhat unusually it was made public via a press release while the National Assembly was in session. In the absence of any information to the contrary, therefore – and President Ramotar on Friday was not at all forthcoming on the subject – speculation is pointless, and Mr Persaud’s own explanation, namely, personal reasons, stands for the moment.
The Minister, who leaves office on January 31, is not without credentials and substantial bureaucratic experience, in addition to which he has the advantage of not being one of those government members who have been in the habit of delivering vituperative diatribes. In the end, however, a minister will not be judged first and foremost on his degree of affability, but on his record in office, and here Mr Persaud will be found wanting. It is true, of course, that he may very well not have crafted the current local government policy and was simply implementing what the ruling party wanted. Unfortunately for him, however, he is the one whose name is associated with it, so he is the one who will take the blame.
Some aspects of the policy, of course, were highly questionable at best, but in any case, were most likely unimplementable in the form in which they were conceived. In particular there was the intention to impose hand-picked Interim Management Committees in place of Neighbourhood Democratic Councils in certain areas prior to local government elections, both as another form of party outreach and especially to impress the residents with what the party could do at the local level.
However, this ploy has simply not succeeded in turning things around in the vast majority of cases, and in some opposition locales it has been met with open rejection. Unfortunately too for Mr Persaud, the local government system had effectively collapsed long before he acceded to office in 2011 – the situation is worse in some places than others ‒ and the installation of IMCs could not possibly salvage things unless, possibly, to begin with the government was going to pour money into them.
As it is, for years now, new roads have disintegrated into a web of potholes, recently constructed bridges have collapsed or have been improperly built – Moruca is the latest instance in this regard – and drainage in many parts remains blocked. Minister Persaud’s brief tenure has done nothing to reverse this pattern.
The most egregious failure has been in Georgetown, but here the actual objective was failure, the idea being to blame it on the Mayor and City Council. This is not in any way to defend the latter which have to answer on various fronts, it is simply to observe that to all intents and purposes they do not have charge of the city. The government – and not just its Local Government Minister – would like to make the disaster that is Georgetown an excuse to install an IMC, but to date they have had sufficient political sense to stay their hand. What has happened instead is that they have put their own Town Clerk in City Hall to add to the confusion and the friction.
The strange case of the Town Clerk is particularly associated with Minister Persaud, because he overrode the recommendation of an interview panel about who should be appointed to the post, and instead gave the job to Ms Carol Sooba, the least qualified of all the applicants on the basis of criteria that he himself had laid down. There was no covering that decision. Prior to that appointment, Ms Sooba had been acting in the position for some time, again courtesy of Minister Persaud, and had been the target of much criticism for her shortcomings in the discharge of her duties.
If it was indeed the case that it was the central administration which wanted Ms Sooba appointed and Mr Persaud was simply following instructions, then he must have found himself under considerable stress, particularly when the matter of the IMCs and the state of Georgetown are added to the mix. In addition, of course, a fair amount of attention has been paid to the Ministry of Local Government in recent times, both because the general sentiment is that local elections may be in the offing, and because of the government’s refusal to sign one of the local government bills into law.
But if the job has been stressful, Minister Persaud has brought some of that stress on himself by his own actions. Recently it was discovered that his ministry had signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Natural Globe Guyana Inc for the construction of a US$30M waste recycling plant. Not only did the company have no experience in this field beyond building a prototype, the project had been handled by the ministry and not by the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board as would normally have been the case. After various other things about the firm surfaced, it was decided to extinguish the MoU.
Mr Persaud did not come to head the ministry with a completely clean record of course. He was at the centre of a controversy involving a contract for updating the country’s laws, printing them, putting them on compact disc and posting them on a website. For breaching financial regulations he was eventually surcharged $500,000. His elevation as minister in the first instance, therefore, was something of a surprise too.
Now Mr Persaud is going, President Ramotar has indicated that he is in no hurry to replace him. As such, therefore, the current Minister within the ministry, Mr Norman Whittaker, will presumably act by default (it will be remembered that he was previously the Local Government Minister). No one should hold their breath for any dramatic change of policy direction on the local government front; Mr Whittaker is the minister who has had the responsibility of dealing with Georgetown for the past two years.
