Desmond Hoyte was correct when in his 1980 ‘State Paper on the Re-organisation of the Local Government System in Guyana’, he claimed that the worst defects of the extant system were that it was not informed by a ‘coherent philosophy’, but his effort at local government reform demonstrated that adherence to a coherent philosophy such as liberal democracy, Marxism/Leninism or cooperative socialism, must also be rooted in an adequate understanding of the nature of a given society if it is to succeed.
According to Hoyte, the system was too centralised, did not allow the vast majority of the citizens to be involved in the management of their affairs, lacked the level of self-sufficiency necessary to cope with the enormous developmental challenges, e.g. local authorities depended too much on rates and taxes, which were insufficient for them to provide adequate services to citizens. But even with those sensible observations, Hoyte proceeded to construct a system that was still very centralised although in keeping with the liberal democratic norms of his day.
