Numbers, proportions and extraordinary conclusions

It’s more than a month since the local government elections were held. The elections themselves were held a long time after the local government bodies were dissolved. The vast majority of the elected are yet to be sworn in to office. The electors are in the dark about who got elected. They don’t know the full details of the result, for example the breakdown of postal voting. 

Then there’s the issue of female representation and quotas. That’s yet to be resolved. The Elections Commissioner has a thankless job anyway, but this issue would have given him and his staff more than the usual quota of headaches elections generate. 

Deshapriya was forced to call for the Local Authorities Elections (Amendment) Act No. 22 of 2012 to be amended to allow councils to be established even without the mandatory 25 per cent quota under special circumstances. That’s not the only mathematical flaw. The entire legislative process and institutional arrangement hoodwinked the voter with the lie of a 60-40 split between first-past-the-post and proportional representation (PR). Part of the gender representational conundrum can be attributed to this error of selling a 100% PR system as the mixed system alluded to above. 

Clearly, a lot of people erred in the passing of legislation, the representatives in Parliament, the Legal Draftsman, the Attorney General who recently offered tendentious claims pertaining to the Provincial Councils (Amendment) Bill, and of course Mr. Deshapriya. Of all these individuals, Deshapriya should have anticipated this outcome. It is unlikely that he didn’t get to see the draft Bill. His opinion would probably have been sought and even if it were not, it is his responsibility to see it, peruse it and offer observations. None of this happened. It is as though all these people were mathematically, intellectually, politically and ethically challenged. They all failed the test, Mr. Deshapriya’s score being the worst if we take the difference between expectation and outcome. Litigation looms and this is a good thing. Sure, in the short term we would have some dysfunctional or even non-functioning councils, but legislators would then be forced to take their responsibilities seriously. 

The story is of course not yet over. What’s most disturbing is that this mess up has emboldened some people to say ‘the old PR system is better.’ City Planning and Water Supply Minister Rauff Hakeem for example has made a pertinent observation and come to a tendentious conclusion. 

“There were complications from the formula meant for the local authorities. If we use the same for provincial councils with slight changes in percentages, it will again create complications after the polls.” 

So we have a bad system being replaced by a flawed system and are using the flaw to justify the original sin! Surely we can do better than this? 

We can conclude only one thing: the local government elections were a stark reminder of the ineptitude of politicians, officials, the civil society watchdogs who are ever-ready to rant and rave about representational issues, and of course the voting population.