An effective local government system brings decision making closer to the people and by this very characteristic allows for these decisions to be needs-based.
It fosters the social networking that is the premise of the term social capital.
This term suggests that individual value is intrinsically tied to collective value and inclines people to do things for each other with the confidence that their doing will be reciprocated.
The contradiction in T&T is that complete power is centralised in the Government.
Furthermore, for decades, the State has concentrated upon itself, all the loyalty and aspirations of the citizens through lucrative contracts for party financiers on one end of the class spectrum, and "make work" programmes on the other. This is indicated when, at certain levels, the discourse becomes pre-emptive attacks by different individuals and groups to protect their self interests.
Support us and we will take care of you has become the focus as the country descends into crisis.
The benefits of staying in power appeal to the lower recalcitrant element of the mind by reflecting the desire to escape from the stranglehold of financial insecurity that characterises the life of the non-aligned citizen.
In so doing, the desire to hold on to office eclipses with contradiction, the higher reasonable element of the mind that is prepared to obey the direction of principle.
Pleasure becomes the ruler, with gratification and indulgence of the instinctive desires of a part of us that we ought to restrain with law and rational principles in our private lives.
Hence the Huxleyan warning that people will embrace and come to love their oppression–and that which we come to love will ruin us.
Short term interest serves one person but affects the others negatively in the long term.
Unfortunately, as collective studies on the subject argue, you have to expect people to act in their own self interest rather than in the interest of society as a whole.
Therefore a coalition of individual candidates and groups whose currents of thought are not limited by affiliations to long established political parties may be our best chance at reform.
Nigel Auguste