Dear Editor,
You may think local government is a small thing. A matter of drains and dams, of potholes and parapets, of councils too minor to bother with, the dull back-room machinery of a country far beneath the grand theatre of national politics. You may think the local ballot is the least of our democracy.
𝑩𝑼𝑻 𝑰 𝑩𝑬𝑮 𝑻𝑶 𝑫𝑰𝑭𝑭𝑬𝑹.
I beg to differ because local democracy is the oldest thing we ever built in this country. It came before the flag, before independence, before there was a national vote to cast at all. To see where it began, you have to go back almost two centuries.
As far back as November 1839, slavery had ended barely a year before, and eighty-three freed men and women, people who the season before had been listed in ledgers as property, pooled their coins and bought Plantation Northbrook for ten thousand dollars. They wheeled the down-payment through the streets of the city in barrows, money saved coin by coin from provision grounds and Sunday markets. They renamed the place Victoria. And then they governed themselves. They laid out lots, raised churches and schools, and elected their own to manage the common land and the common drains.
That was the birth of the Guyanese village. The early administration of those villages, as our own historians have recorded, laid the foundation of local democracy in this country. Before we had a national assembly worth the name, before independence, before a flag, we had the village council. Ordinary people, fresh out of bondage, discovering they could run their own affairs. That was the first thing free Guyanese ever built for themselves.
Hold that picture. Now look at what was done to it.
In 1994 Guyanese went to the polls and chose their councils. That would prove 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 was held in this country. The party won and governed through general election after general election in that span, yet never once let the people choose the councils that paved their streets and cleared their canals. A child born the year of that 1994 vote could leave school, finish university, marry, and start a family of their own without ever casting a single local ballot. Year after year the reason given was the same: the system was being “reformed,” the talks were ongoing. The talks ran for twenty-two years. Local democracy went into a coma, and it stayed there until the PPP lost office.
Only then, in 2016, within its first year in power, did the APNU+AFC coalition under David Granger bring the people back to the polls, for only the second local election the country had seen in decades.
Twenty-two years. Sit with that number for a moment. A country is more than its laws and its budgets. It is also its people, and people are shaped, civically shaped, when they are young.
This isn’t only my opinion; it’s what the research shows. A 2025 review of dozens of international studies found that when young people take part in local governance, the results are the ones you would expect: stronger civic engagement, sharper civic skills, and with them a greater sense of political efficacy, more social capital, more confidence, and the plain belief that one’s own voice counts for something. Researchers call this mechanism the socialization hypothesis, the idea that taking part in community life is how a person picks up the knowledge, the skill, and the conviction that they can act on the world around them. Vote locally often enough, other studies find, and you come to trust your institutions more, and to expect government to answer when you call.
Read that in reverse, and you have the indictment.
If taking part in local advocacy and the democratic process is the school where civic-mindedness is taught, then a generation shut out of that school for twenty-two years simply never sat in the class. The young Guyanese who came of age between 1994 and 2015 grew up in a country where the most local, most immediate form of democracy did not exist for them. They never knocked on a neighbour’s door for a candidate. They never argued at a community meeting. They never watched someone from their own street win a seat and fix something that was broken, and so they never felt that small jolt of recognition: I did that. I can make a difference here. Nobody is born with that feeling. It grows through practice, and the practice has been taken away.
You can see the result today. The United Nations estimates that roughly seventy percent of Guyana’s population is now under thirty-five, which is to say the bulk of the country was raised in 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐒𝐈𝐋𝐄𝐍𝐂𝐄, and when local democracy was finally handed back, look how few reached for it. Turnout at the 2023 local elections was just thirty-five percent. In nearly three hundred constituencies there was no contest at all; the seats were handed over by acclamation because not one person came forward to stand. We like to say the young don’t care about their communities. I beg to differ. They were never taught how.
And here is where I will say plainly what I believe this was really about.
A people who have never been allowed to govern their own village will struggle to believe they can govern their nation. A man who has never once been heard about the drain at the end of his road does not grow up expecting to be heard about anything bigger. We talk about apathy as though it were a flaw in a person’s character. More often it is something done to them. A population that has been taught, over a whole generation, that taking part changes nothing is the easiest population a government will ever have to manage. It doesn’t organise, it doesn’t turn out to vote, and it doesn’t push back.
Now follow what that SILENCE actually delivered. With no elections to fill the councils, someone still had to run them, and that someone was chosen in Georgetown, not in the community. Across the country, lapsed and dissolved councils were handed to appointed Interim Management Committees, and critics documented at the time that many of these committees were packed with people loyal to the ruling party. Your town was no longer run by neighbours you elected and could vote out. It was run by appointees you never chose and could not remove, answerable upward to the minister rather than outward to you.
Spread that across seventy councils and ten municipalities, and the arithmetic becomes plain. The more local government a party controls by appointment, the tighter its hold on the whole country, and the fewer platforms remain from which anyone might rise to challenge it. An elected council is a training ground for new leaders and a stage for local grievance. An appointed committee is neither.
Call it neglect if you like. It looks a great deal more like a strategy, and one that worked for over two decades: a quiet electorate, councils filled with loyalists, no local contests to lose, and no local leaders rising to trouble the centre of power.
The defenders of those years will tell you the delays were technical. The local government laws needed reform; there was wrangling in Parliament and at the Elections Commission, and these polls are genuinely hard to run. Some of that is true, and some of the later obstruction was real. But ask yourself: what reform takes twenty-two years? What discussion needs an entire generation to grow up before it can reach a conclusion?
I don’t accept that local government is a small thing.
It is the inheritance that eighty-three freed people bought with coins pushed through the streets in a wheelbarrow, the school where free people first learned to govern themselves. Switch it off for twenty-two years and you switch off a generation’s belief in its own power. That is the quiet theft I want you to see. It leaves no missing money and nothing you can photograph, but you feel it every time a young Guyanese shrugs and says, 𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩’𝙨 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙥𝙤𝙞𝙣𝙩, 𝙣𝙤𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙄 𝙙𝙤 𝙬𝙞𝙡𝙡 𝙘𝙝𝙖𝙣𝙜𝙚 𝙖𝙣𝙮𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜.
Here is the better news, and it’s the note I want to end on. The inheritance of 1839 was never destroyed. The village council still stands, and this generation can still be taught the thing that was kept from it: that the street is theirs to fix, the council theirs to fill, and the nation theirs to shape, and that this kind of power has always been built the same way, by ordinary people pooling what little they have and refusing to be told it can’t be done.
Some may think it is too late for that generation.
But I beg to differ
Yours truly,
Randy J. Critchlow
