IF it rains in Georgetown, is it the President’s fault that the city floods? This is but one of many interesting questions that lend credence to the constitutional reform movement, as the nation asks itself in the years to come core questions about the type of governance we want over the longer term.

After all, it is certainly no accident that, with a change in government, the capital city’s streets have become useable, even after a hard night’s rainfall, something we could seldom claim previously.

But should this have even been the case? Should a change in administration yield such striking local changes? One can now say that, turning the original question on its head, it is absolutely to the President’s credit that the city is bone dry.

We can hold this as a marker of coalition progress! As Guyanese citizens, however, we can’t really hold as acceptable that if the administration again changes, things will go back to the swampy way they were. That will make basic issues like this unjust political tools, putting the nation’s reputation at risk in the process, as virtually all visitors traverse Georgetown.

I want to punch through all the complexity, back and forth and politics involved in constitutional reform, to demonstrate how a simple reform would address this problem. It is not an idea completely of my own design, but a combination of ones various students of this issue have put forward.

In order to bring balance to the Guyanese political system, we should amend the Representation of the People Act so that those members of parliament who represent the various regions are directly elected from those regions. Therefore, as an example, the Region Four representatives from the various parties will be directly elected by those who live there, rather than be appointed to hold those posts by the party lists, as they are now.

Why would this simple amendment make such a difference? It’s all about bargaining power and accountability. The reason the drainage in Georgetown is an election issue is because the Region Four representatives are neither directly accountable to their constituents, nor empowered to advocate for funds from the national coffers. Instead, these issues are debated at a party level, and if the party in power doesn’t want to support the members of your community (presumably because they didn’t vote for them), there’s not much that can be done to change that.

One would hope that this reliance on central government funds will, to a degree, dissipate, once the City Council improves tax collection, but there will always be a need for supplementary funds, given the city’s vulnerability to flooding.
An outsized burden for addressing these mini-natural disasters rests on Georgetown’s residents. If, on the other hand, regional representatives are directly accountable to their constituents and not dependent upon being on the party list to hold their posts, they will be independent enough to advocate for supplemental funds, no matter who is in office.

But won’t this irritate party leadership, who want, above all, conformity to the party voting line? Perhaps, but let’s not forget how heavily any elected candidate must depend on his/her party, given that they control both voting support and campaign funding closely. It would be very naïve to think that any independence at all would lead to anarchy. But the more you think about this, the more you’ll realise that there is precisely enough wiggle room to solve local problems while maintaining national party alliances.

I imagine the conversation between party leadership and a regional representative advocating for funds will go something like: “I need these funds or my constituents may vote me out,” followed by, “But you can’t vote with that other party; you’ll undermine us,” followed by, “What if I vote with them on a pretty innocuous bill?”

The reward to small amounts of independence is, therefore, high, while the risk is relatively low. This represents an easy way to make lots of people very happy, while mildly irritating very few. And, best of all, it requires no grand national review process; just a simple amendment.

I will continue this discussion in greater detail periodically, as the more one investigates it, the more it reveals its charms. Spare a thought, however, for all the good a little independence would do. The awarding of scholarships has recently come up as a point of contention; maybe that process would be better monitored and more transparent if the administration were less focused on basic local issues.

Too much frustration is pent up in our society, because there aren’t many places to go for recourse, and the administration has so much on its plate. We owe citizens the best possible governance we can give them, and this will go a long way toward making that a reality.