Dear Editor,
Minister Dharamlall giving two weeks’ notice to vendors to relocate from the roadside at Anna Regina seems very strange. One would have expected the Mayor of the Anna Regina Town Council to issue those orders. For a PPP/C Minister of Local Government to override the Mayor in a locality where the PPP/C won the last local government election and installed a mayor of their choice questions the system and authority of the concept of local government on a national scale. Has the Mayor and Town Council of the Anna Regina municipality gone missing in action? It is of little wonder that the general consensus amongst the residents is that the minister should install an interim committee to manage the affairs of the Anna Regina municipality, despite fresh Local Government Elections (LGE) looming on the immediate horizon.
A recent confrontation between vendors and what seems as the Minister’s henchmen in a Facebook video gives the impression that the vendors want what is illegal (vending on the roadway) to be made legal and it is believed that the vendors, judging from their vociferousness, were paying the council for maintaining that illegality (the privilege of vending on the road). This is essentially the reason the council could not face them to tell them to move, the minister had to do their dirty job, evicting the vendors from the road. The subject minister overriding the council where the council fails to enforce the national bylaws is understandable.
The concept of local government is for people to decide what is the best or immediate interest of their communities and working together to achieve it whilst adhering to the national bylaws. Sadly! The powers-that-be PPP/PNC had superimposed themselves on this concept in destructive ways. They have reduced local government elections to nothing more than a litmus test to ascertain a head count of their political support amongst the masses – the result was to politicize the country right down to the grass root level, making an already divisive country more divisive. LGE should be about people vying for a chance to represent and uplift their communities. The names of political parties should not appear on the ballots for LGE, it should have the names of people that people within the communities can reckon with, even though they may be politically affiliated.
The present PPP/PNC councillors dispensation has taken strife instead of democracy to the grassroots. The result is that the ruling party people in the municipalities and NDC’s become emboldened and behave like satraps or little presidents. This is the quintessential undoing of the Anna Regina Town Council.
Yours respectfully
Rudolph Singh
