ON SUNDAY referendums were held in eight villages about the possibility of changing status from community to municipality. Not surprisingly seven of the eight overwhelmingly voted in favour of becoming municipalities, the only exception being Pano Polemidhia, the majority of which voted against becoming part of the existing Kato Polemidhia municipality.
It is bewildering why the government bothered with the referendums. Was there really any possibility that the residents of the villages would not want to elect a mayor and a municipal council? Pano Polemidhia voted against because its residents did not want to be swallowed up by the existing municipality, but if they were offered their own they would certainly have voted ‘yes’.
People like the idea of more municipalities because it means more well-paid public sector jobs and perhaps higher prices for their properties in the future. If they had to pay out of their own pockets, in the form of municipal rates, for the assortment of jobs that would be created as part of the new ‘services’ that would be offered by the new municipalities, they would all have voted ‘no’.
Municipalities exist primarily to provide jobs rather than services and are funded by the taxpayer, through central government. It seems quite astonishing that at a time the government is supposedly cutting public sector jobs it has decided to set up another seven municipalities, that would require accountants, clerks, engineers, cultural officers, labourers etc.
If we were not in a recession, the AKEL government would probably have created 20 new municipalities because a bloated public sector is very much part of the communist ideology which wants a big state in charge of the livelihoods of as many people as possible. It is not only a way of re-distributing income, but it also allows the political parties to wield more power over voters and create more public posts for their respective members.
What we really need is a reduction in the number of municipalities. Greater Nicosia has seven municipalities, when its citizens could have been served much more economically and efficiently by one or two, at most; Greater Limassol has five. This is a totally absurd state of affairs, because it undermines the very idea of local government.
As things are, most municipalities are heavily in debt and need funding from central government, on an annual basis, to make ends meet. If there were fewer they would be able to generate more revenue and eventually become self-sufficient. Only then would they escape the control of central government and become independent branches of local government. Local democracy is not served by creating municipalities wherever there are a few thousand residents.
