Dear Editor,
PNCR leaders are concentrating on high-tech devices for ensuring the accuracy of the voters’ lists instead of questioning whether proportional representation (PR) is the appropriate method for selecting representatives in the local government elections. PR has not served us well. It has centralised control in the hands of the party leader and has put the political party between the people and their representatives. In the rural areas, it has contributed to divisiveness in communities that reflect the race wars at the centre. Equally important is the fact that PR has facilitated election rigging, by centralising the counting of votes at election headquarters. At first, ballot boxes were tampered with. Afterwards, electronic transfers of votes from polling stations to election headquarters facilitated computer glitches. Despite all the hullabaloo about free and fair elections, no election since 1953 has been completely free of skulduggery.
Community relations have suffered badly from political robots who try to apply PR to every election. In African villages and East Indian communities where traditional bonds should be strengthened to provide help to those who are weak, party rivalries have destroyed the social fabric. The addition of narcotics and smuggling to the frayed social relations, has resulted in crime which is now uncontrollable.
It is sad that our political leaders do not understand these factors and run to America and New Zealand to design voting arrangements for our local governments. The colonial mindset in our leaders is a disgrace.
To preserve what tradition remains in our societies, representation arrangements for local governments should revert to village councils in the rural areas and to first passed the post elections for the wards in Georgetown and New Amsterdam. The towns of Anna Regina and Corriverton should be reconceived as the rural communities that they still are. The Neighbourhood Democratic Councils (NDCs) should be similarly reconceived into African villages and East Indian communities. Africans need a chance to achieve, within the villages, the emancipation that they were denied by the plantocracy. The PNC misconceived the prospect of developing village economies and permitted the suppression of African collective self-determination by the inappropriate design of the NDCs.
The PNCR and the AFC are sitting idly by while President Jagdeo uses local governance to aggrandise more power to himself. Mr Corbin has passed the local government baton to Keith Scott ,who is an urban dweller with very little understanding of the complex relations in rural communities. Mr Scott should apply his mind to the division of Georgetown into wards instead of being overly pre-occupied with finger-printing identification exercises. If voters’ lists are put up in public places in wards, the people will be far more efficient at weeding out phantom names than any finger-printing scrutiny.
Can Mr Scott rise to the task of championing the cause of local government empowerment by proposing appropriate representational arrangements? History will not treat him kindly if he is tricked into thinking that finger-printing minutiae are important when Africans, in particular, are being pushed further down the social ladder by suppressive local government organs and inappropriate representational arrangements.
Yours faithfully,
Clarence F Ellis
