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The Governance Logic of Noynoy
The Governance Logic of Noynoy
Very few people have the opportunity to be given a private talk by a person of renowned stature. In some cases you have to pay P3,000 just to hear the former British Prime Minister talk about what he did in office when such material is readily available on the net.
Today I was privy to the talk of my Boss. After first being warned of the meeting I thought it would be a sermon on our performance and our need to shape up and do better. However, what he said was better; “Give it your 110% because what little thing you do contributes to the whole campaign… we all have a stake in this,” (paraphrased, obviously, this is not a policy pronouncement) .
And then he proceeded to talk about the C5 project, what’s wrong with the administration, the budget spending, etc., most of which I already know. But then he talked about the NBN-ZTE deal where an overprice of P40 billion for the project was revealed. And then he asked one of us to compute how much it would cost to build classrooms to fill the 20,000 to 40,000 shortage. It amounted to P20 billion. Had government officials exercised restraint in their greed, we would have built those 40,000 classrooms and students wouldn’t have to undergo quadruple shifting (not a typo, we do QUADRUPLE shifting) and DepEd would not have to resort to lumping subjects together (e.g. Science is taught in the same period as English) just to maximize the resources available.
In my yearend evaluation report, he noted that I needed to see how the small details fit into the bigger picture. And this was what he was talking about. I was the one who provided him with the materials he used to construct his logic, but I am the very same person to have failed to connect the dots. I have provided him with research on school shifting and subject clustering but I didn’t look beyond that to see that it was not simply bureaucratic inefficiency caused by lack of funding, it was corruption leading to lack of funding which eventually led to poor bureaucratic performance, and ultimately led to the deprivation of QUALITY education to our public school students.
It is easy to say we are in this state because of “corruption.” But many of us have divorced the act itself to the ill-effects of the act on the affected. We would focus more on the corruptor and, fueled by our burning hatred, would rip the offender apart limb from limb had he/ she been thrown our direction.
This does not solve the problem at all. Because we have been preoccupied with our hatred of our corrupt politicians; starting hate pages on facebook and twitting about them furiously, even to a point that we engage each other in word war in our e-groups or wall posts, that we have forgotten the disenfranchised of the very act we condemn.
That is what the Good Governance stance of Boss reminds us of. We should not simply punish the wrong doers but more importantly, we should attend to the needs of the deprived because of the government’s inability to serve them.
When in his talk he focused on how much of the overprice in the NBN-ZTE project could have been used to build schools instead of harping about how these corrupt politicians should be punished, that’s his Good Governance Policy!
Many a time, I have sifted through transcripts of his speeches, and, as ordered, I have compartmentalized it per issue so that we would have an inventory of his policy pronouncements. And often he makes his case to his audience.
He talks about how the fertilizer fund scam contributed to the poor harvest of our farmers. He talks about how improper usage of the Calamity Fund deprived us of resources come Ondoy and Pepeng. He talks about erroneous textbooks contributing to the degradation of our public school education system. He talks about a lot of things, that would have been seen as simply a negative campaign against the current administration. But here is where his critics have gotten him all wrong, because the case he made to the people is the very logic of his Good Governance policy:
All our governance objectives are noble and in the service of the Filipino people. It becomes harmful when it is distorted and made to serve oneself. Therefore, in order to make this country better you don’t need grandiose platforms, all you have to do is to do your job, and do it well, rightly, and in accordance to the principled objective.
That was why when he told us a while ago to give it our 110%, he wanted us to follow the same logic of governance; do your job, give it your best, and don’t do anything wrong because we are in government and what little things you do affects the people.
I am reminded of what happened earlier. Ten senators absented themselves from the hearing in the Senate, allegedly to kill the deliberations on the C5 Road project. The little things we do, like absenting ourselves from the last day of session may not mean a lot to those senators, but to the sectors of society whose bills shall be passed today, it means they would have to wait until after the elections before their concerns are heard by the legislature.
The little things we do in government, like writing a memo, proposing amendments to the law, correcting the clerical error in the budget of QUEDANCOR, increasing the budget of the Commission on Human Rights… the little things that we do have national consequences.
Many a time I have been asked, if I wasn’t working for Noynoy would I still vote for him for President. The automatic answer I give them is a yes that is full of conviction. And when asked to explain why, I tell them, “because I know how he works!”
He is mindful of the outcome of the little things we do in government. He is mindful of the people who will be affected by the little things we do in government. And most importantly, he has pledged to do the right thing, so that all the little things that we do would benefit the people we intend to serve.
Today I was privy to the talk of my Boss. After first being warned of the meeting I thought it would be a sermon on our performance and our need to shape up and do better. However, what he said was better; “Give it your 110% because what little thing you do contributes to the whole campaign… we all have a stake in this,” (paraphrased, obviously, this is not a policy pronouncement) .
And then he proceeded to talk about the C5 project, what’s wrong with the administration, the budget spending, etc., most of which I already know. But then he talked about the NBN-ZTE deal where an overprice of P40 billion for the project was revealed. And then he asked one of us to compute how much it would cost to build classrooms to fill the 20,000 to 40,000 shortage. It amounted to P20 billion. Had government officials exercised restraint in their greed, we would have built those 40,000 classrooms and students wouldn’t have to undergo quadruple shifting (not a typo, we do QUADRUPLE shifting) and DepEd would not have to resort to lumping subjects together (e.g. Science is taught in the same period as English) just to maximize the resources available.
In my yearend evaluation report, he noted that I needed to see how the small details fit into the bigger picture. And this was what he was talking about. I was the one who provided him with the materials he used to construct his logic, but I am the very same person to have failed to connect the dots. I have provided him with research on school shifting and subject clustering but I didn’t look beyond that to see that it was not simply bureaucratic inefficiency caused by lack of funding, it was corruption leading to lack of funding which eventually led to poor bureaucratic performance, and ultimately led to the deprivation of QUALITY education to our public school students.
It is easy to say we are in this state because of “corruption.” But many of us have divorced the act itself to the ill-effects of the act on the affected. We would focus more on the corruptor and, fueled by our burning hatred, would rip the offender apart limb from limb had he/ she been thrown our direction.
This does not solve the problem at all. Because we have been preoccupied with our hatred of our corrupt politicians; starting hate pages on facebook and twitting about them furiously, even to a point that we engage each other in word war in our e-groups or wall posts, that we have forgotten the disenfranchised of the very act we condemn.
That is what the Good Governance stance of Boss reminds us of. We should not simply punish the wrong doers but more importantly, we should attend to the needs of the deprived because of the government’s inability to serve them.
When in his talk he focused on how much of the overprice in the NBN-ZTE project could have been used to build schools instead of harping about how these corrupt politicians should be punished, that’s his Good Governance Policy!
Many a time, I have sifted through transcripts of his speeches, and, as ordered, I have compartmentalized it per issue so that we would have an inventory of his policy pronouncements. And often he makes his case to his audience.
He talks about how the fertilizer fund scam contributed to the poor harvest of our farmers. He talks about how improper usage of the Calamity Fund deprived us of resources come Ondoy and Pepeng. He talks about erroneous textbooks contributing to the degradation of our public school education system. He talks about a lot of things, that would have been seen as simply a negative campaign against the current administration. But here is where his critics have gotten him all wrong, because the case he made to the people is the very logic of his Good Governance policy:
All our governance objectives are noble and in the service of the Filipino people. It becomes harmful when it is distorted and made to serve oneself. Therefore, in order to make this country better you don’t need grandiose platforms, all you have to do is to do your job, and do it well, rightly, and in accordance to the principled objective.
That was why when he told us a while ago to give it our 110%, he wanted us to follow the same logic of governance; do your job, give it your best, and don’t do anything wrong because we are in government and what little things you do affects the people.
I am reminded of what happened earlier. Ten senators absented themselves from the hearing in the Senate, allegedly to kill the deliberations on the C5 Road project. The little things we do, like absenting ourselves from the last day of session may not mean a lot to those senators, but to the sectors of society whose bills shall be passed today, it means they would have to wait until after the elections before their concerns are heard by the legislature.
The little things we do in government, like writing a memo, proposing amendments to the law, correcting the clerical error in the budget of QUEDANCOR, increasing the budget of the Commission on Human Rights… the little things that we do have national consequences.
Many a time I have been asked, if I wasn’t working for Noynoy would I still vote for him for President. The automatic answer I give them is a yes that is full of conviction. And when asked to explain why, I tell them, “because I know how he works!”
He is mindful of the outcome of the little things we do in government. He is mindful of the people who will be affected by the little things we do in government. And most importantly, he has pledged to do the right thing, so that all the little things that we do would benefit the people we intend to serve.
In light of the dismaying survey results, we become anxious, depressed, and disappointed. Yes, me too. But, in his 20 minute talk, our principal reminded us not to let it get to you. It only means that we have to work harder, we have to give it our 110%.
And considering that our biggest contender is remiss of his duties as a senator and is not mindful of how his seemingly innocuous deed of inserting funding twice for the same project would divert funds from more socially relevant projects, I’d work extra hard to prevent him from taking the Presidency, where he might do more damage to the people.
The survey may say we’re tie, but all it means to me is that they’ve finally caught up even when we’ve already given them a three year head start. It is our pledge that we will generate jobs, that we will improve basic education, that we will provide accessible health care, and that we will reform the judicial system. We can’t be disheartened now. The Session might be over but the campaign’s just begun. Doing the little things that we do to help our country, it’s GAME ON!
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Towards Consensus
In 2006, the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, published a collection of speeches under the title, “Islam Hadhari: A Model Approach for Development and Progress”. In his third chapter, “Islam, Malaysia, and the Wider World”, he declares that civilizational dialogue cannot succeed without conflict resolution, which is at the forefront of the Malaysian government’s efforts.
In addition to issues requiring conflict-resolution within Malaysia, Abdullah expressed his intention to work with conflict resolution centers in the West, to learn their methodologies as well as to resolve outstanding issues that affect Muslims.
We applaud the Prime Minister’s “problem-solving” approach, and we support all further application of social science research and development to the issues of inter-faith dialogue that have become so important in today’s world. We are keenly aware that the younger generation has little patience or respect for ideological formulations that do not actually and visibly solve problems.
There are several mediation techniques that we in Malaysia are now studying and trying to apply to resolution of some of our most recent inter-religious conflicts. Indeed, the present Malaysian Prime Minister’s national campaign and slogan, “One Malaysia, People First, Performance Now” cannot possibly be implemented without an expansion of the government’s present repertoire of problem-solving skills, although a noble effort is being made.
But before addressing these various issues themselves, we must familiarize ourselves with various mediation methods that have been developed in many other countries as part of any modern commitment to actually solving problems.
As committed Muslims, we are so keenly aware that the principle of “consensus” (or “shura”) as mandated by Al Qur’an is the correct method of Islamic social and political progress, that we urge all of our fellow Muslims to develop methodologies of consensus immediately, especially taking into account developments in high technology that are changing the face of governance. With a world population approaching seven billion souls, we will need every technological resource to sustain formats for consensus.
If we believe our Prophet’s tradition that we are all like one body, in which the distress of one part must influence us all, we would like to point out that recently, it seems that the poorest of our human communities, such as in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, North China, and now Haiti, are bearing the brunt of unprecedented natural disasters. And these disasters do not even touch what MIT’s Noam Chomsky (in his recent “What We Say Goes”) warns as the ever-increasing likelihood of nuclear conflict.
If, then, our human social body is becoming truly ill, then the weakest and most vulnerable portions are our poorest people. This is why these poor innocents are taking the brunt of early phases in the collapse of the earth’s eco-system. However, it may be only a matter of time before our modern plague of natural disasters moves into the more advanced societies, such as our own. Mother Earth may indeed be warning us, and purifying herself of our mis-management.
Social Scientists who have studied the phenomenon of human happiness have discovered that the average index of happiness in countries is correlated with the diminution of the gap between the rich and poor of that country (see Ingelhart, R., and Klingermann, H.D.: “Genes, Culture, Democracy, and Happiness”, in Diner and Sukh (ed.), “Culture and subjective Well-Being”, Cambridge, 2000).
A corollary of what they have discovered is that happiness does NOT correlate with wealth. For example, Myers and Diener (Psychological Science 6: 10-19, 1995) report that, in spite of the fact that average purchasing power in America has increased enormously in the past fifty years, the proportion of the population that describes itself as happy remains stubbornly at 33 percent.
If human happiness correlates with effective wealth distribution, then our Islamic economic system assumes primary importance in providing such happiness worldwide, and we Muslims have a clear duty to further develop these systems as quickly as possible.
The previous Protestant/Capitalist interest-based banking system will inevitably widen the gap between rich and poor, as more and more money is made by people who already have money. This capitalist “riba” system cannot, then, produce happiness, even for the successfully rich among the capitalists, since unhappiness is now seen to increase at all levels along with the gap between rich and poor.
The number of young people no longer willing to sacrifice their personal happiness on the altar of this or that economic or religious ideology are increasing. That is why they are becoming alienated from us, their elders, in ever greater numbers, and resorting to drugs and sex to restore the feelings of happiness which they perceive us as robbing from them, through our incompetence and hypocrisy.
We pray that Allah swt will enlighten us all, and guide us, in securing human life in a viably happy form on this fragile earth, insofar as it may be His Pleasure to do so.
Jakarta 27 January 2010, Post-Indonesia/ US Interfaith Cooperation Meeting
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