Making local govt work

One of the guiding ideas of the proposed reform is that the Government would have responsibility for policy, while local government bodies would have responsibility for implementing said policy. The Government would retain control of areas such as Energy, National Security, and WASA and TTEC. But decentralisation would happen for Ministries with responsibility for education, public health, social services, infrastructure, labour and agriculture, amongst others. It is hoped that such changes would lead to more efficiency, as well as a greater sense of empowerment on the part of citizens.

In respect to efficiency, even a small country like ours can benefit from letting local communities handle community-specific issues. This already happens in respect to drains and secondary roads. But even health can benefit, especially in the area of primary health care, where educating people about healthy lifestyles can go a long way to preventing disease. And it is a given that such public education programmes are far more effective when done at the community, rather than national level. This is even truer of social services, because such an approach makes it easier for needy citizens to access such services. Local government provision of such services also allows social workers to better judge, and even discover, the needs of deprived citizens. Even education policies can be usefully adapted in order to ensure that children from different communities are taught more effectively and relevantly, since the background knowledge of students from Cedros would be different from that of students from Port-of-Spain.

There is, however, an important caveat to all this. Prime Minister Patrick Manning, speaking last Wednesday at the launch of the Government’s Draft White Paper on Local Reform, remarked, “The decentralisation of functions and responsibilities to local government, rather than the devolution of power, is therefore being advocated at the core of our local government reform.” We are not sure how Mr Manning is drawing this distinction, but decentralisation can hardly be effective without the devolution of power as well. It is, after all, a basic management principle that people are not motivated to take responsibility unless they also have power. This is one reason that most public bureaucracies are so inefficient.

So local government reform will surely be dead in the water unless, as part of that reform, its representatives are given more authority than they have at present. This would necessarily include consultation on policy issues, even though the national government would have the final say here. Yet it is also a basic of management that policy cannot be implemented unless persons at all levels agree on the specific policy in the first instance.

This is where the empowerment of citizens come in. When people can approach representatives from their own communities to deal with their problems, this gives them a sense that they can influence governance outside of the general election every five years. That sense of empowerment, as the experience of other nations have shown, is crucial to social stability. It is when people feel powerless that they resort to protests and even criminal activity in order to get their wants.

The present consultation is therefore an important part of Trinidad and Tobago’s political evolution, just as important than the Draft Constitution that is being laid in Parliament today. However, it is all too easy for local government reform to become a mere cosmetic exercise, and that is an outcome that all concerned parties must do their utmost to avoid.