EDITORIAL - Comatose local government

Desmond McKenzie may want to ride a dead horse. For the one he has been flogging seems past comatose.

McKenzie is the shadow minister of local government, having previously huffed and puffed his way through nearly nine years as chairman of the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation (KSAC), the municipal authority within whose boundaries reside nearly a fifth of Jamaica's population.

Apart from the frenetic pace with which he went about little, we can't recall much that he did. Angela Brown Burke, McKenzie's successor, is being equally un-impactful without his locomotion.

We were drawn to this matter by McKenzie's moaning in Parliament last week that Noel Arscott, the local government minister, was being too slow over local government reform.

If Arscott doesn't get going soon, McKenzie said, he might find that there is an election "and he is out of office before the process is completed". But on exactly what is to be done, or his perspective thereof, McKenzie offered nothing. Neither was Minister Arscott any clearer when he spoke ahead of McKenzie and said that laws are soon to be drafted on the matter.

But this newspaper ought hardly to be surprised by this latest puff of hot air about which politicians have wagged ephemerally for the better part of two decades and into which they have sunk a lot of money, although we confess to coming close to letting our guards down after the last round of municipal elections 15 months ago, when the governing People's National Party proposed to reshape the Government and municipal authorities to focus on real development issues, rather than welfare agencies under the effective control of national MPs.

Legislative or constitutional changes

It, however, doesn't require legislative or constitutional changes for the local government to lift themselves out of their do-nothingness. That is merely a matter of vision and will. It starts with local government councillors seeing themselves, and freed by their parties, to be genuine community representatives rather than gofers for MPs and constituency caretakers. Councillors/chairmen, too, must also appreciate the need to better apply their intellects to finding ways to make existing arrangements work for parish development.

The foregoing notwithstanding, we believe that our old default position remains eminently sensible. The parish councils should be abolished and are replaced by regional and city managers, who would have clear performance targets, and are accountable to a committee of Parliament, to which they would report periodically in open hearings.

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