Dear Editor,
We are often told that local government is a small matter: drains and dams, potholes and parapets, councils too minor to bother with. I beg to differ. Local democracy is the oldest thing we ever built in this country, and what was done to it deserves far more anger than it receives.
Go back to 1839. Barely a year after slavery ended, eighty-three freed men and women pooled their coins, bought Plantation Northbrook, renamed it Victoria, and governed themselves, laying out lots, raising schools and churches, electing their own to manage the common land and drains. That village council was the first thing free Guyanese ever built for themselves. Local democracy is not a footnote to our history; it is the foundation.
Now consider what became of that inheritance. In 1994 we went to the polls and chose our councils. That proved to be the only local government election the PPP held in its twenty-three years in power. From 1994 until 2016, twenty-two years, not a single local election took place. It won general election after general election, yet never let us choose the councils that paved our streets. The excuse, repeated every year, was that the system was being reformed. The talks ran for twenty-two years. Only after the PPP lost office did the APNU+AFC coalition, in 2016, finally bring the people back to the polls.
Why does this matter? Because civic-mindedness is learned, and the local ballot is the school where it is taught. Research consistently finds that taking part in local governance builds what a healthy nation needs: engagement, confidence, leadership, and the plain belief that one’s voice counts. A generation shut out of that school for twenty-two years never sat the class. The Guyanese who came of age between 1994 and 2015, and the UN estimates seventy per cent of us are now under thirty-five, grew up without ever knocking on a door for a candidate, arguing at a community meeting, or watching a neighbour win a seat and fix something broken. We call them apathetic. They were never taught how to be anything else.
And here is what that silence delivered. With no elections, the councils still had to be run, by people chosen in Georgetown rather than in the community. Lapsed councils were handed to appointed Interim Management Committees, many of them, critics documented at the time, packed with ruling-party loyalists. Your town was no longer run by neighbours you could vote out, but by appointees you never chose and could not remove, answerable to the minister, not to you. Spread that across seventy councils and ten municipalities and the logic is plain: the more local government a party controls by appointment, the tighter its grip on the country, and the fewer platforms remain for anyone to challenge it. Call it neglect if you like; it looks far more like a strategy that worked for over two decades.
The defenders of those years will say the delays were technical: the laws needed reform, there was wrangling in Parliament, these polls are hard to run. Some of that is true. But what reform takes twenty-two years? What discussion needs an entire generation to grow up before it can reach a conclusion? A delay of two years is administration. A delay of two decades is a decision.
The good news is that 1839 was never destroyed, only put to sleep. The village council still stands, and this generation can still be taught that the street is theirs to fix, the council theirs to fill, the nation theirs to shape. Some will say it is too late for them.
But I beg to differ.
Yours in National Development,
Randolph J. Critchlow
