MINISTER Ganga Persaud announced during a recent press briefing that local government elections are expected to be held early in the year 2013. According to the minister, all legislation has been placed before the 9th Parliament, and has been deliberated on at the committee level.
“Fortunately or unfortunately, the Parliament deliberated on all, but at the committee level. However, two pieces of legislation were approved, so the remaining four pieces of legislation were not looked at,” he highlighted.
He attributed this inconsistency to the 2011 General and Regional Elections, which brought about major setback to the operations of the country in several respects, this included.
The minister said that while there were committee level discussions on the other four pieces of legislation, those discussions were not conclusive, and there is more still to be done.
“So, as a result of the elections, those four were deemed as having lapsed. However, there were discussions at committee level on all four pieces, but (those discussions were) not conclusive. What we sought to do a couple weeks ago, we have relayed two pieces of legislation, those are the Local Authority’s Amendment Act and the Local Government Commission Act,” he stated.
The minister informed that, during the next sitting of the National Assembly, the tabling of the Municipal and District Council Bill, as well as the Fiscal Transfer Bill, will be dealt with.
Since a lot of work has already been done by the members of the 9th Parliament relative to this, the minister said, he hopes that the bills would see the Select Committee doing far less work.
“We are hoping that the Select Committee will have less work to do, and so we will have these pieces of legislation coming out of (the) Select Committee during the course of this year, and after recess of the Parliament,” he added.
“Once this is done, he noted, these pieces of legislation will be approved.” This, he said, would allow staging of the local government elections.
He said that this is the only option the Local Government Ministry is left with, because of the many setbacks that were incurred during and after the 2011 elections.
“I was hoping that we would have those elections in 2012, but given the number of incidents which would have taken place, we were unable to do that,” the minister stated.
According to him, that the said bills took some time before going back to Parliament was to avoid losing all the work that was already done to them.
“We didn’t want to lose all the work that was done by the members of the Select Committee in the 9th Parliament, so we sought to incorporate all that work that was completed into these bills which we are putting to the National Assembly; and so, yes, let us hope that 2013 will see us having local government elections,” he said.