THIS WEEK, I want to begin by expressing my shock at the tragic events in Norway.  One lone gunman gunning down 91 innocent people has shifted the world’s attention on the country from its pioneering partnership on global warming mitigation – crucial to Guyana’s LCDS – to an unprecedented slaughter of this kind.
To put some perspective on this, Anders Behring Breivik’s victims outnumber those of the last four American shooting massacres – Columbine (13), Fort Hood (13), Virginia Tech (32), and Capitol Hill (6) – combined.
Next, I want to turn my attention to a particular topic that I’ve dealt with from various angles in the past, the reasonable expectations of the governed from those who govern.  Or, more simply put, what are the fundamental things against which we can measure a government’s performance of its mandate.
What is that we really have to go on in terms of what can be expected – as a baseline – for development?  For me, some reasonable pillars of governance, indicators of performance if you may, can be Education, Housing, Security, Health and a couple others.

In Health, for example, what are the objective benchmarks against which a government’s performance or lack thereof could be measured – looking outside of Guyana, there is no real objective gold standard for what should be a government’s ideal health care mandate.
In the richest society in the world, the United States of America, healthcare is premised on individual capacity to afford it as opposed to any universal access – if it is that you don’t have the money to pay for proper healthcare or health insurance in the US, you might as well write yourself off if you catch anything two degrees of seriousness above the common cold.   Contrast that with the decidedly poor Cuba where the citizens have access to arguably one of the best health care systems in the world, completely free of cost.  A balance somewhere in the middle between those extremes is the European health care system, more precisely that of France.
Guyana can be said to be closer to Cuba, with a healthy mixture of a functional free public health national system complemented by a vibrant private sector health care sector.  The question is, who is to say that this is the ideal or not, and against what baseline of comparison?
As an offshoot of health, we can also briefly consider disaster preparedness and response – compare America’s post-Katrina disaster management, that of Japan after the tsunami, and Guyana after the coastal flood of 2005, or this year’s recent flooding of the hinterland community of Lethem.

In the area of housing, we could look at the colossal housing collapse in the US of recent, where a mixture of predatory mortgaging and a lack of effective regulatory oversight resulted in great personal loss for tens of thousands of Americans.  In Guyana, we have a ministry dedicated exclusively to housing, and under the tenure of which the distribution of houselots – in a sustainable and equitable process – has been transformative not only to the lives of individual citizens but to the country as a whole.
Of course there are a couple of areas which cannot be easily classified but which recognize that there may be scope for government intervention, the problem being to define the precise degree.  Take the tragic traffic situation which has come under public scrutiny in the first place – how do we measure and assess government’s responsibility or culpability in this area?
In the final analysis, we need to stop measuring our development indices against other countries – no two contexts are the same. I believe that the only true benchmark of performance is as direct as possible approval by the people of a country, a standard set by popular consensus.  The problem is of course accurately gauging that consensus as a tool for governing – even with a limited employment, the one mechanism to have an authenticable sense of consensus from people is the referendum would prove unwieldy and tedious in a government’s execution of its five-year programme.
The alternative, and in my view this needs to be made very clear considering the fact that we are in an election year, I believe a viable balance is to use the election manifestos presented by the contesting parties as an indication of not just what they intend to do, but – whoever wins – how it is that they follow, or deviate from that expressed intent, during their tenure in office.