Election agendas in T&T

There are few areas of public governance that have been the subject of as many studies, consultations, speeches, and White Papers as the reforming of our system of local government. Yet, local government election campaigns are about the worst possible time to label prospective reform issues as central to their eventual outcomes.

For one, the kind of change needed to regulate better quality representation and service delivery is not the prerogative of councillors and aldermen in a municipal corporation. This is a process suited to enlightened parliamentary decision-making, and faithfully compliant executive action.

Once elected, local government representatives will be responsible for implementing whichever reforms are eventually enacted, but they are not the ones to determine the legislative conditions under which they are to perform.

Secondly, the least of the apostles at local government election time are usually the actual candidates who routinely receive third or fourth or fifth-class billing on the hustings.

It should not inspire anyone that being a local government representative provides a stepping stone to a parliamentary career, when in fact it is a substantially important job that has meaning for people and their communities.

In the process, community needs and ways of managing them, are rarely at the top of the main campaign agendas, and it has become reliant on some kind of “reform” to accord local representatives their appropriate place in the scheme of things.

At this time, even the partisan huddles at cottage and home meetings focus on strategies to win, and not necessarily to work out ways of resolving community challenges.

Instead, the advent of messaging apps has played such a role, during terms of office, and helped stimulate joint deliberation and action on immediate needs, almost in defiance of the formal systems for addressing them.

Virtual “local government”, via WhatsApp in particular, has thus latterly represented an alternative platform (at least at the primary level of discourse) to the research and solution-finding functions of statutory meetings. I am really not sure where village councils stand in this regard.

Another reason why local government reform is such a remote (or even irrelevant) matter for consideration at this time, is that these contests have traditionally been reduced to statistical indicators of the future prospects for political parties at general elections. August 14 is no different.

Current campaign shenanigans are dominant in the public discourse, and who aligns with whom is currently deemed infinitely more important than accumulated water puddles in the drainage system that will soon yield the next dengue outbreak.

I suspect that the more devoted representatives agonise constantly over the manner in which their sponsor political organisations organise these campaigns. Some of the most committed, competent and conscientious politicians I have ever met have been local government representatives – on different sides of the political fence.

Many of them would tell you that when it comes to solution-finding and the allocation of frequently scarce resources, there is a level of mature bipartisanship that kicks in. This is particularly true around times of crisis and emergency.

You can also usually tell the difference between parliamentarians who have served in local government and those who have not – not that this represents any kind of upward mobilisation, for they all serve national interests however communally sub-divided. But there always appears to be greater sensitivity to the micro-issues.

They eventually learn, you see, that the real action resides in the delivery of goods and services at street, block, and community levels. Efficient public health and waste management, community safety and security, spatial planning and development, and community infrastructure and services - all things of value that exceed almost everything else in national governance.

What a reformed system can do is to ensure that these matters are attended to with a higher level of orderliness, transparency, and efficiency, through the wider availability of resources and planning systems to ensure prompt and reliable delivery.

In a sense, that’s all we need. But the outcome of these current elections can change none of that. August 15 will find us in the same legislative space.

But none of this is to dismiss the need for comprehensive reform of the system of local government. There have been numerous iterations that have largely received bipartisan support. It is really hard to distinguish between what Suruj Rambachan and Hazel Manning and Franklin Khan advocated so strongly for. In principle, their proposals were the same.

But that’s not what these elections are all about. Local government reform could not have been more irrelevant at a time of local government elections.