Participatory Democracy: Giving power back to the people.

This offering was prompted by a recent news story in the Daily Nation newspaper of Kenya. In summation, the story talked about a group of Councillors who had been invited to a conference in Nairobi by the President to seek their support in the upcoming referendum on the draft Constitution. The Councillors heckled and booed the speakers and when the President tried to address them they punctured the air with shouts of “pesa! pesa!”(Money! money!). This was in apparent reference to a demand for a pay raise and increase in their allowances before they would offer their support to the passing of the new Constitution.
Unfortunately, these are the kind of grass roots leaders we have today, imbued with greed and bereft of any development agenda, yet quick to hold the government hostage by demanding pay raises to do what they were elected to do.
This dismal lack of public decorum displayed by the Councillors only reinforces points we had noted in previous posts, such as this initial offering found HERE.
Dire prognosis
The government will not bring about progress or development, not in present Kenya or in the next few generations. This grim prediction can be avoided if several things are to occur:
- The government redefines its role. It needs to avoid engaging in commercial enterprise, such as seeking foreign investors to partner in government projects. News item can be found HERE
-The government needs to provide better services for taxes collected. Its record on security for its citizens is abysmal. Thugs run wild and even state security forces have been involved in dubious incidents of gunning down civilians without probable cause or provocation.
-Infrastructure needs to focus on rural areas. While having a modern multi lane highway is impressive to visitors, the rural peasantry needs accessible roads to take produce to market and to facilitate commerce regionally.
So in contrast we present two inspiring stories of communities that organized to take back local government from officials and vest it back to the people most affected by its decisions.
Porto Alegre, Brazil-Proponents of participatory budgeting
In the early 1990s, the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, then-led by the leftist Workers’ Party (PT), garnered international attention for pioneering citizen participation in allocating a chunk of city resources. Now fifty thousand residents of Porto Alegre—poor and middle class, women and men, leftist and centrist, take part in the participatory budgeting process for this city of a million and a half people, and the numbers involved have grown each year.
Thousands of citizens sit through meetings, discuss budget priorities, and elect delegates to represent their neighborhoods. The result has been increased civic activity and city budgets which fairly address the needs of the whole city, rather than the wealthy and powerful few. The transparency of the process has eliminated corruption, which had nearly bankrupted the city. Democracy is thriving as citizens gain competence in talking with the mayor, specialists in agencies, and fellow citizens of different means.
Power and learning
The participatory budgeting cycle starts in January of each year with dozens of assemblies across the city designed to ensure the system operates with maximum participation and friendly interaction.
Each February, there is instruction from city specialists in technical and system aspects of city budgeting. Regular folks learn fast because what they are learning empowers them to change conditions that limit or extend their lives.
In March there are plenary assemblies in each of the city's 16 districts as well as assemblies dealing with such areas as transportation, health, education, sports, and economic development. These large meetings—with participation that can reach over 1,000—elect delegates to represent specific neighborhoods. The mayor and staff attend to respond to citizen concerns. In subsequent months these delegates meet weekly or biweekly in each district to acquaint themselves with the technical criteria involved in requesting a project be brought to a district.
At the second regional plenary, regional delegates prioritize the district's demands and elect councillors to serve on the Municipal Council of the Budget. The council is a 42-member forum of representatives of all the districts and thematic meetings. Its main function is to reconcile the demands of each district with available resources, and to propose and approve an overall municipal budget. The resulting budget is binding.
Since the participative budgeting program started:
• There are 120 public day-care facilities instead of two
• Fifty-seven new schools have opened; twice as many children attend school
• The percentage of homes with running water and sewer service has gone from 46 to 85 percent
• The transit system is modern, affordable, efficient, and widely used.
• Each year the bulk of new street-paving projects have gone to the poorer, outlying districts.
• In addition to these achievements, corruption, which before was the rule, has virtually disappeared.
• The Porto Alegre budgeting process is now used in 200 Brazilian cities, including São Paolo, one of the largest cities in the world.
Communal Councils in Venezuela- Revolutionizing democracy
Since the start of 2006, thousands of tiny Venezuelan neighborhoods, with an average of 200 families each, have been organizing communal councils. The councils are part of a broad effort to build a new political system of participatory democracy, in which citizens have control over the decisions that affect their lives. The councils are helping communities address common interests, funneling more money to basic community needs, and bringing people together in thousands of neighborhoods.
The story begins in the 1980s, Venezuela began an extensive decentralization process, launching mayoral elections and handing over new responsibilities to local governments. After Chávez was elected president in 1998, he continued the decentralization, but changed its emphasis. He called for transferring power not to local government, but directly to popular movements.
The Communal Councils Law was passed in the Venezuelan National Assembly in April 2006, it legally recognized the communal councils and, according to Chapter Five of the Law, established the councils’ right to legally receive and administer resources from government institutions.
The law recommends that each urban council contain 200-400 families, each rural council at least 20 families, and each indigenous council at least 10 families. These assemblies are to elect executive, financial management, and monitoring committees, as well as thematic committees based on local priorities (health, education, recreation, land, safety, etc.).
By law, they can receive funds directly from the national, state, or city governments, from their own fundraising, or from donations. In turn, the councils can award grants for community projects. If they set up a communal bank with neighboring councils, they can also make loans to cooperatives or other activities for use.
Effects on the community
Eight months after the law was passed, over 16,000 councils had already formed throughout the country—12,000 of them had received funding for community projects. That’s $1 billion total, out of a national budget of $53 billion. The councils had established nearly 300 communal banks, which have received $70 million for micro-loans.
The communal councils have implemented thousands of community projects, such as street paving, sports fields, medical centers, and sewage and water systems.
Getting people to participate
A national system of participatory democracy requires more participation from more people than any social movement or other form of civic engagement. Venezuelans are indeed participating in massive numbers. Thousands of communities, however, have yet to show much interest in organizing a communal council.
Encouraging participation.
-First, Caracas has delegated significant power directly to the communal councils. The allure of self-government attracts many people.
-The government has also provided direct positive incentives for participation. The most obvious is money. Many people get involved because they can get funds for neighborhood improvements, but only if they form a council.
-The councils attract people by making their events fun. Some of the more prolific councils mix music, food, and entertainment into their assemblies. These virtual block parties transform one of the costs of participation (tedious meetings) into a benefit (a good time).
-Finally, the government is trying to reduce the obstacles to participation. Because the councils are so local, the transportation and time costs of participation are less.
-Another approach is even more ambitious—freeing people’s time by making participation part of their jobs. Such a program could especially boost the participation of working professionals and could be coordinated by the state, like a form of community service.
Venezuela’s communal councils are still a work in progress, but so far, the results are promising. Thousands of communities are mobilizing as never before, taking advantage of their new power to decide government spending and policies.
Conclusion
From the above stories there are many fine examples that we will research and tweak to fit to Kenya’s local situation. The budding political party, The African Economic Democracy Party is currently a Think Tank dedicated to Rural Development policy formulation and implementation and will be charged with bringing to fruition these ideas here and in previous offerings.

The demerits of factory schooling

In a previous article, we decried the usefulness of our education system, as it is today, in preparing students for nation building. In the article, found HERE, we took issue with the emphasis on the teaching methods used that emphasis rote learning to pass exams. The top scoring students in the national exams are feted while being cursorily reassured that they may have a promising future, while the lesser scoring students are discarded to fend for themselves in the informal sector, without further training.
In this submission, we will make arguments against this education system we have in place. We have to state that we are not diminishing the usefulness of a higher education especially in specialized areas such as doctoring, lawyering or other sciences. What we do wish to present is the argument that we should adopt a policy of giving our students a well rounded education to prepare them for a fulfilling life after school.
India’s Shikshantar: Rethinking education and development.
This grassroots movement, website HERE, encourages individuals and communities to reclaim control over their own learning processes, minds, and hearts. Its philosophy springs from the Gandhian principle of Swaraj, or liberation through self-mastery and self-awareness of the diverse and non-violent cultures, traditions, and values of South Asia.
For the people of Shikshantar, social change starts with individuals and communities existence and daily practices. That means drawing on traditional wisdom and imagination to build trusting communities; value indigenous expressions and local resources; and continually share skills, visions, and experiences across generations.
Community members involved with Shikshantar have transformed the entire city of Udaipur in Rajathstan into a learning ecosystem.
• Through songs, stories, films and publications, the community is regenerating Mewari, the local language that has been falling from use because of the government promotion of Hindi and English.
• Led by artists, farmers, healers, chefs and artisans, free workshops teach local crafts made from waste, media production, self-healing, slow food recipes, and sustainable agriculture.
• Shikshantar also offers resources to walk-outs - its term for people who have chosen to leave traditional schools - such as apprenticeships that give walk-out youth on-the-job training, real world vision, and the skills they need for green vocations and lifestyles.
The Community School: Offering alternatives through Relational Education
“Relational Education” is a form of education that places a primary focus on the development of trusting, supportive, and resilient relationships between all members of the learning community. It has been crafted by the staff and students at the Community School, Camden, Maine.
What the Community School offers to students, who are 16 to 20 years old, is unique and attractive – a six month residence that combines work, community living, and academics and results in a high school diploma regardless of previous success or failure in traditional schooling.
What it is
Teachers as Listeners
One aspect of our approach is that teachers must become listeners. We actually call our faculty teacher/counselors. Each student is assigned a “one to one” or advisor, who they meet with regularly to go over their progress in the program and to develop a trusting and supportive relationship.
Informal Time and the Experience of Each other as Human Beings
Teacher/counselors live at the Community School. Human interactions occur over a breakfast bowl of cereal, on a ride to work, in a late night discussion in the living room, during “informal” times when our “official roles” in the community are not as sharply defined. It is here that we find out that we are more alike than different.
The Development of Trust
Choice: Students have chosen to come to us of their own free will, they have applied to the School, gone through an extensive interview process and have chosen to stay after completing the two and a half week trial period at the beginning of the term
Sensible structure: Day to day life at the Community School makes “sense” – students work at jobs in the community during the day, are responsible for daily household chores, and study at night
Academic engagement: Students are involved in the structuring of their own courses; whenever possible curricular subject matter is relevant to the student’s interests and skill levels
Democratic decision making: Students are involved with faculty in making decisions regarding programmatic issues as well as codes and consequences for individual behaviors.
A Sense of Belonging
Because of its small scale (eight students, six faculty), residential nature, and focused goal, the School creates a learning community which invites a sense of belonging from the participants.
The School’s Outreach program which works with graduates and families to help them with their post-graduate lives.
Former students also play a role with current students through volunteering as tutors, panelists, special class presenters, and working in the program.
Responsibilities and the “Real World”
Students at the Community school hold jobs in the community and owe room and board. They do not graduate if they are not paid up. They have to find and hold these jobs in order to complete the program.
Pertinent points
-From the Indian Shikshantar movement, we learn the usefulness of preserving our own cultures and languages. Perhaps we can introduce tribal languages as options for students to study.
-Another idea would be to have students stay with a host family of a different tribe over holidays to learn their customs and traditions.
-Students who do not make it to University and don’t have funds to pay for technical school, could perhaps get apprenticeships with trades people to learn hands on. Experienced trades people could get a kind of teaching certification and would then give some kind of diploma to successful apprentices.
- From the Community School in Maine, we learn of the usefulness of students and teachers interacting in an informal setting. If our teachers scheduled activities with students such as eating lunch together while discussing the day’s news, attending sporting events and others, teachers and students would value each other more and would be more receptive to formal learning.
Conclusion
We ought to reconsider the Culture of Schooling because:
• It labels, ranks and sorts human beings. It creates a rigid social hierarchy consisting of a small elite class of ‘highly educated’ and a large lower class of ‘failures’ and ‘illiterates’, based on levels of school achievement.
• It forces human beings to violently compete against each other over scarce resources in rigid win-lose situations.
• Confines the motivation for learning to examinations, certificates and jobs while delinking knowledge from wisdom and practical experiences.
• It drives people to distrust their local languages. It prioritizes newspapers, textbooks, television as the only reliable sources of information. These forms of State and Market controlled media do not serve the interests of the general public.
• It destroys the dignity of labor and devalues the learning that takes place through manual work.
The African Economic Democracy Party, will be responsible for implementing the views presented here. We hope it will have a national appeal when we launch next year. We invite economic revolutionaries to join us to bring the progress only we the people can effect.
Reader responses welcome.

Debunking the old 'time is money' adage

In this offering, We put forth the notion that the worth of a man should not be determined by how much he can consume or accumulate but by servitude and the gifting of a legacy of empowerment to these he has encountered in his life’s journey.
We argue that there is a life beyond capitalism and the greed that accompanies it. There is a life beyond the depletion of non renewable resources if we strive to live harmoniously with nature’s abundance. There is a better life for the workers of the world if employers put people first above profit.
We present this story of an alternate program that has been designed and implemented to value man’s contribution to the healthy and sustainable growth of society.
Time Banking-Strengthening communities through reciprocity
Time Dollars were developed in 1980 by law professor Edgar Cahn, who lamented that crucial work to improve people’s lives—such as child and elder care—is much needed but little valued. He saw that many who could do these tasks were idle and felt useless. To get people economically engaged, Cahn proposed a system where people earn credit according to the number of hours they work. These Time Dollars can then be “cashed in” for services, like yard work, tutoring, etc.
The necessity for a Time Bank
The monetary economy only pays for the specialized skills that produce the goods and services it requires.
Result: Certain kinds of work—rearing healthy children, preserving families, making neighborhoods safe and vibrant, caring for the frail and vulnerable, redressing injustice, enriching our culture, saving the environment—are not recognized, valued and rewarded as “real” work. People who invest their time in these areas, people who do not have money, and people who are perceived as lacking marketable skills are often rejected or discarded.
What is Time Banking all about?
At its most basic level, Time banking is simply about spending an hour doing something for somebody in your community. That hour goes into the Time Bank as a Time Dollar. Then you have a Time dollar to spend on having someone doing something for you. It's a simple idea, but it has powerful ripple effects in building community connections and promoting social justice by connecting people through reciprocity.
Time Banking is about local individuals helping each other out, one-on-one or with group projects. They help rebuild neighborhood networks and strengthen communities. It connects you to the best in people because it creates a system that connects unmet needs with untapped resources.
The Five Core Values of Time Banking
Assets -We are all assets.
Every human being has something to contribute. No more throw away people. We cannot overlook the unique skills and talents that each of has to offer others. Every member of society has talents that may not be immediately marketable or lead to employment but may be used to enrich the social fabric of a community.
Redefining Work -Some work is beyond price.
Work has to be redefined to value whatever it takes to raise healthy children, build strong families, revitalize neighborhoods, make democracy work, advance social justice and make the planet sustainable. That kind of work needs to be honored, recorded and rewarded.
Reciprocity -Helping works better as a two-way street.
The question: “How can I help you?” needs to change so we ask: “How can we help each other build the world we both will live in?”
Social Networks-We need each other.
Networks are stronger than individuals- People helping each other reweave communities of support, strength & trust. Community is built upon sinking roots, building trust, creating networks. The trust, sharing and mutual support of our social networks are essential elements of healthy communities and healthy individuals.
Respect-Every human being matters.
Respect underlies freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and everything we value. Respect supplies the heart and soul of democracy. We must respect where people are in the moment, not where we hope they will be at some future point.
Pertinent points
How would a Time Bank work in a rural setting?
The time bank would be set up on a website and on paper at the local community center and it would be run by volunteers. Local residents would sign up with their known talents and they would also list their wants if they have them at the time. As the list grows, residents would log into the website and see if there are people who require their particular expertise. If there is, they would be put in touch with the person in need. They would perform the task and earn a credit equal to about an hour of work. We will call this credit a ‘Time shilling’; we will come up with a catchier name later.
Some possible scenarios:
• A retired school teacher helps some high school students with tutoring. He earns credit in the time bank to use later. The students then log in the hours as owed to the community and they list areas they would be of use to the community.
• A farmer needs help with putting up a fence or other task on his farm. He previously donated some poultry products to a committee that was having a fund raising dinner to raise funds to renovate the local primary school and earned time shillings. He redeems his credits by requesting the high schools to help him put up the fence.
What kinds of services would be exchanged in a Time Bank?
Help at Home
• Child Care
• Cooking & Sewing
• Hair & Beauty
• Housekeeping
Community Activities
• Clean Up/Recycling
• Community Service
• Fundraising
Home Repair
• Car Care
• Carpentry/Construction
• Electrical
• Garden & Yard Work
• Painting
• Plumbing
Education
• Classes/Workshops
• Computers/Technology
• Personal Finances
• Tutoring/Mentoring
Conclusion
As we have said before, the rural areas are the life blood of our nation. We need to make them as habitable and sustainable as possible and reverse the rural to urban migration.
Our local governments are not the beacons of hope to hinge our future on.
Politicians are lacking in any development ideas and it would be the height of folly to expect progress from a bunch of fraudsters only out to enrich themselves through the pillaging of public resources.
Progress will only come through local community organizations tackling local issues. Local leaders aspiring to elected offices will have to pay their dues through the implementation of local projects.
We are in the process of finalizing a manifesto of our socially, politically and economically inclusive organization to be known as The African Economic Democracy Party.
Economic revolutionaries wanted, apply within.
Reader responses welcome.