The three-headed donkeys and Colombo's new Municipal Council
 

by Rajan Philips

The law screwed them first. Then the Colombo voters shot themselves in the foot. Because a single candidate did not meet the age requirement an entire list of candidates of the UNP was rejected as ineligible. The letter of the law prevailed over the spirit of democracy, learned absurdity over simple commonsense.

The irregular UNP list, going by the different accounts in the media, appears to have been the result of party infighting. Regardless, the faction wanting to take control of Colombo fielded a list of independent candidates as proxies only to resign after the election.

The voters elected the largest number from the proxy list and under the municipal elections law this proxy group is automatically conferred with executive power even though the group does not have a clear majority in Council.

Now it transpires that the law does not permit the elected independents and their UNP alternates to switch places as swiftly as they thought they could.

"The three-headed donkeys", Dr. Colvin R. de Silva colourfully described the independent members, quite a few of them, elected to our first parliament after independence.

And Colombo is now stuck with twenty - three similar specimens, without a leader and not knowing which way to turn or run, let alone govern.

The voters could have done themselves a favour and avoided shooting themselves in the foot by electing the team of Vasudeva Nanayakkara who ran a principled campaign on a comprehensive and even ambitious platform. In their inscrutable wisdom, the voters gave him only 14 Councillors.

Steeped in a political tradition that readily accepts the verdict of the voters regardless of the merit of the verdict, Mr. Nanayakkara has indicated that he would play the part of the Leader of the Opposition in the new Council. What he might have wanted to do as Mayor he will now have to push for from the opposition, and he has the majority to do it.

It is not clear whether the new Council will get to function - either with the elected independents or their backroom alternates. It may continue to be paralyzed by the legal shenanigans and political chicanery that have so far marred this election. Or there could be a new election - all over again for what is Sri Lanka without surplus elections.

Beautiful Colombo

Whatever happens, Vasudeva Nanayakkara, now that he has thrown his electoral hat in the local political arena, should stay put and contribute to making Colombo a better place for its residents and a better example to the rest of the country.

Thanks to decades of corruption, cronyism and institutional malaise what was once a beautiful and functioning city into an ugly and dysfunctional conglomerate. Colombo deserves to become a beautiful and functional again.

Its first priority is to address the growing gaps within its bosom: the gaps between rich and poor with a struggling middle class in between, landlord and tenant, saunas and slums, luxury cars and tired pedestrians, international English schools for the chosen and national Swabasha schools for the rest, five star hospitals and half star clinics, super markets and pavement hawkers, expatriate condos and Madras lodges for the locals. The list goes on.

Anyone active in local politics should take it as both a moral calling and a political imperative to attend to the urban poor and the have-less working and middle classes who go through all the misery of urban living but share little of its pleasures.

But to be able to help them structurally out of their misery and help them in the long run, the City Council should pay attention to minimizing the external pressures on Colombo and to addressing its internal problems. Let me elaborate.

Colombo is a paradoxical city. In comparison to cities in other countries, it is not a big city, but for all of Sri Lanka Colombo is the only city. It is a city of less than a million people but it is also the city for over 20 million Sri Lankans.

Every Sri Lankan, or Sri Lankan household, has a stake in Colombo and their combined expectations and pressures almost on a daily basis can wear down even the most efficient and resourceful metropolis. And Colombo is neither.

The City is buffeted by endless in-migration and ever-increasing daily traffic from outside its limits. This causes pressures and unrealizable demands on the facilities that Colombo as a municipality is expected to give its rate payers: housing, schools, hospitals, garbage disposal, roads, water, sewerage etc.

Where it cannot meet these demands the City ends up with huge infrastructure deficits - that people experience daily: traffic congestion, uncollected garbage, lack of schools, shortage of housing and health facilities, as well as frequent water and electric power cuts (although these shortages arise from factors outside the City's control).

Where the City tries to meet its demands either through the real estate development market or through individual initiatives - the outcome is one of spatial anarchy.

The once pleasing streetscapes of Colombo are turning into vistas of visual pollution.

The big gap

Condominiums are sprouting like mushrooms without proper assessments, according to newspaper reports, to verify if they are within existing infrastructure capacity. The spatial anarchy compounds the infrastructure deficit - not just in regard to physical infrastructure but also the social infrastructure of health, education and recreation.

The second priority, then, is to initiate the process of relieving Colombo of its pressures from the 19 million Sri Lankans outside of Colombo. These pressures are the direct result of the socioeconomic disparities between Colombo (and the Western Province) and every other Province and local body.

A necessary, but not sufficient, response to this is the devolution of powers and functions away from the (Colombo) heartland to the hinterland.

In other words: political devolution and administrative decentralization. There is no way around them, and fundamental to both is local government reform and the empowerment of Colombo and other local bodies. The handbook for LG reform is already there: the 1999 H. A. P. Abhayewardhana Commission Report on Local Government Reform.

Vasudeva Nanayakara was among the few parliamentarians who gave oral evidence before the Abhayewardhana Commission in 1998. Now he has the opportunity and the obligation to actively facilitate the implementation of the Commission's recommendations.

LG reform could be undertaken incrementally and functionally in specific areas and provide the foundation for a more broadly scoped devolution.

As I have pointed out in an earlier article, the powers and functions that initially resided in the local bodies were gradually taken over by central government boards and agencies. Examples of these include the Electricity Board, Water Supply and Drainage Board, the Urban Development Authority etc. It is a longstanding practice everywhere to assign these functions and powers to local bodies, and where appropriate to provincial or regional bodies

The Colombo municipality should seriously review its existing practices and reclaim responsibilities for functions that should properly fall within its purview. As a rule, as far as possible, the reallocation of responsibilities should go along with the transfer of resources including staff, from the central agencies to the municipality.

The functional reallocation of responsibilities between the central agencies and the Colombo municipality has a direct bearing on what should be the third priority for the new Council, namely, dealing with the problems of - what I have called - infrastructure deficit and spatial anarchy.

The main challenge in building capacity in essential services such as water, sewerage, transport, electricity and garbage, is to identify in which of these areas the Colombo municipality could act alone within its jurisdiction and in which areas it is necessary to act in concert with adjacent local bodies and even the Western Provincial Council.

For example, in the area of transport, Colombo is part of a much wider 'commutershed' (analogous to watershed) that virtually covers the whole of the Western Province.

A transport 'solution' should therefore be sought at the broader, Greater Colombo Area, level but the City will have to be a principal player in the process. A 'transport solution' for the Greater Colombo Area is a subject by itself and deserves a separate discussion, some other time.

Within its own jurisdiction, the City should look after the City bus service, school bus service, City roads, traffic control measures, parking etc. Economies of scale will also require cooperation among municipalities in regard to garbage collection and disposal.

Time to plan

To deal with the spatial anarchy that is destroying Colombo, the municipality should reclaim the powers and functions of physical planning and approving developments. These now reside mostly with the UDA, which, modeled as it is on the practice of a city-state like Singapore, is an anachronism for Sri Lanka.

The UDA has a role to play - in setting national standards and providing technical assistance to smaller municipalities but should stay out of areas that really belong to Colombo and other local bodies.

The fourth priority, encompassing the first three, would be to lay the foundation for a strong, streamlined and professional administration that will deal with all the matters that the municipality is mandated to address. I say "lay the foundation" for good reason, as it would be impossible to build a new administration and deliver substantially on each of the three priorities during a single Council term.

The key is to make a good start, identify and focus on what is doable, create the nucleus for a good institution and ensure its continuity.