Money vs Man in the Mayoral Race

Op-Ed

Modern political philosophy has it that self-government as such is one of the principles of constitutionality which is generically observed and maintained by western political culture, based on Man’s free will and democracy. I have the temerity to appertain Georgia to this type of world community, grounding my optimism on the fact that we are currently running a national campaign of self-government elections.

Naturally, we are spending on this cheerful political event a lot of our tax-payer’s money, and other people’s cash, too. We are also spending our valuable time on it, the remnants of our national energy, and many other resources. The famous good question is if this is all worth it. There is a battalion of mayoral wannabe’s in Tbilisi, saying nothing of other local election hot spots, each of them bending over backwards to get up there, and carrying their own portion of sizable electoral expenditure. I just wonder if any of those candidates and their ardent supporters has even an elementary ability to recognize that there cannot be a good mayor in nature without a good budget; in other words, if you do not have enough material capacity in the city’s coffers, you cannot be an efficient mayor no matter how talented, educated, experienced, patriotic and charismatic you happen to be.

This is no longer about good men and women; this is about money. To put it a little quizzically, even I could be a good mayor of my town, even without any administrative or engineering background, if I had a chance to garner and mobilize enough funds to build and rebuild it; change its dilapidated infrastructure, create additional traffic patterns and new parking spaces, build new squares and recreational facilities, maintain better inner-city schools and kindergartens, construct powerful smoke-arresters to save lives from pollution, to keep a police force that could guarantee that modern vandals in expensive cars learn to park correctly and drive defensively, to protect the city from flagrant architectural terrorism and to liberate it from dust, dirt and litter.

None of this can be done by a person without money. All that we are trying to do during mayoral and other campaigns is a futile job. None of the current campaigning big mouths, full of endless empty words and a ton of sweat, will ever be able to change much in their cities unless they have the resources to do so. Any mayor, be they democratically elected or assigned from above, would most likely do the same job if they had at their disposal ample material resource to make a difference.

I understand that in our times of democracy, a mayoral posting is a political position, and elected mayors then simply hire good managers to do the actual job. In our Georgian reality though, politically elected mayors are the managers themselves as a rule: yes, they have deputies and assistants, and many aides of other categories, but all the credit for doing something good and valuable will still go to that elected mayor, though all the lumps for a bad job will fall on his or her poor head, too.

The bottom-line is that it is not the elected mayor who does the job but the money and the army of aides and specialists who are hired by that money. Any mayor, even the most popular, beloved and appreciated, is a sheer zero without enough money in the city budget. And the proverbial moral here is that we the people do not have to be so terribly overexcited about whether the mayor of our beloved capital city, or any other city or town, or borough or village, is Nick, Rick, Jack, or Jill: they will never make a difference in anything that concerns this city and its tired-of-electoral-endeavors population unless they are equipped with appropriate financial potential. It is the money that matters in creating a better standard of living, not even the best of the mayoral candidates that are eligible to be elected.

Nugzar B. Ruhadze

Photo source: clarencecaldwell.com