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Palace blames laws for underperformance
The word from the Palace these days is a variation of the blame game they have perfected. They used to blame the previous administration for their early problems. Now that they have been in power for more than five years, they are blaming our laws for their underperformance.
The way I heard it, the Palace is claiming there is nothing wrong with Mar Roxas and Jun Abaya among other non-performing Cabinet members. They were unable to deliver, so the Palace claims, because of our tough procurement law.
I think they shouldn’t have used this excuse, but rather, reserved it for future use, just in case Mar Roxas makes it. He will surely need something to blame because it is certain he will continue to deliver nothing. He cannot very well blame the previous administration the way P-Noy did with impunity.
I guess it is just as well this excuse is taken out from their list. Public officials cannot blame our tough procurement law. That’s a given when they took their oath of office. Should Mar win, he would need something more creative to explain why the MRT still can’t run as normal or why NAIA is still congested.
How come folks like Mrs. Napoles and others were able to draw billions of pesos from government coffers despite the tough procurement and audit laws? She got caught, but only because she made the mistake of alienating a trusted assistant the way VP Binay foolishly threw aside his former vice mayor who knew everything.
That is the mystery of it all. Our tough procurement law was written on the premise that all public officials are crooks or could be tempted to become crooks. But the real crooks have not found the tough procurement law enough of a hindrance.
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When they proclaimed a policy based on Daang Matuwid, I presumed the only change is they will follow the rules. Unfortunately, the P-Noy administration focused only on the propaganda value of Daang Matuwid. To keep themselves clean, they only went through the motions of seeming to launch project after project with no real intention to go beyond feasibility studies.
Former Budget Secretary Ben Diokno made a good observation: “This new tack of blaming existing laws for the administration’s own failure is dangerous. It creates a convenient excuse for the administration not to be accountable for its own failings.
“When a government agency fails to spend what Congress has authorized it to spend, then one way of penalizing it is by reducing its budget in the following year. But that’s unfair for the potential beneficiaries of such a budget.
“For example, if the budget for the improvement of the MRT was not used to properly maintain the urban transit system, then the riding public suffers. Reducing the MRT’s budget in the ensuing year will only exacerbate the problem; hence, further cuts in the budget are not the solution. The first best solution, it would appear, is to replace the head of the agency.”
Enough with the excuses! Officials must take responsibility for the underperformance. P-Noy should have insisted his Cabinet members deliver projects already approved. Budget Sec. Butch Abad blamed “technical deficit” for the underperformance, but this is simply not acceptable.
Even an overpriced Makati Science High School building is better than letting our young science students hold classes under the trees. Of course we would rather that infrastructure projects are undertaken expeditiously and honestly.
But we are getting the worse of everything. We don’t have a running MRT3 system because of faulty maintenance, but the maintenance contracts seem to be as tainted as Makati’s overpriced buildings.
The new ones they signed up with multiple contractors will now cost the taxpayer about what it used to cost when only Sumitomo was handling it… or even more after all have been awarded. This is clearly an unfortunate consequence of the erroneous decision of then DOTC Sec. Mar Roxas to change the maintenance provider because Sumitomo was “too expensive.”
In having more than one maintenance provider, DOTC is also violating the principle of having a single point of responsibility. There will be finger pointing when things turn horribly wrong again, as it would.
How DOTC packaged the MRT3 maintenance contracts shows they are able to go around the tough procurement law if they want to. Except that even after they did, there is doubt the taxpayers will get value for money spent.
Indeed, DOTC is merely focusing on the packaging. Their press release is trying to tell the public that a reputable German firm is on top of the main maintenance contract now. But read down the story and you will find a familiar name… the old one that is already maintaining LRT1 and MRT3.
Is the tough procurement law the reason why they failed to deliver the quick exit runway at NAIA which Mar Roxas promised in 2012 as a means of alleviating congestion on the single runway? These taxiways are also recommended in an IATA paper on what’s wrong with NAIA operations issued the other month.
Is the tough procurement law the reason why DPWH is unable to deliver the right of way to an Ayala subsidiary for the four kilometer Daang Hari road? Why is it taking more than four years and counting to complete a four-kilometer road?
Is the tough procurement law to blame for the failure of DOTC to let the Air Force know they have to leave their Mactan base to give way to a PPP project to build a second terminal?
How come an agency like DepEd, which is strictly speaking, not an infra agency, able to implement their PPP projects to build new school houses with little problems? They are also operating within the same procurement and PPP laws DOTC and DPWH are.
Is a La Salle brother whose expertise is education a better manager of his department’s PPP projects than those supposedly with better credentials in the building of public infrastructure? Or does Bro Armin just have common sense and a sense of mission?
A previous Annapolis graduate, Roy Golez, performed spectacularly when he was asked to clean up a hopelessly corrupt and inefficient Post Office. Too bad, a later Annapolis graduate, Jun Abaya, failed to continue the good reputation of the naval academy with his lack of performance.
The procurement and other laws are a given that anyone who seeks election or accepts appointment to public office must live with. They cannot use the difficulty of complying with these laws as their excuse for failure.
That they failed is no longer in doubt. It is obvious in the sacrifices our people must continue to endure due to MRT’s horrible and unsafe service and the delay in delivering other infrastructure. If only our people are intelligent enough to vote in their self interest rather than be taken in by emotional appeals, they can vote the failures out.
Mob rule
Here is a very appropriate comment posted on Facebook by a dear colleague, Val Villanueva, former business editor of PhilStar on that mob scene in Makati.
“Enrile, Jinggoy, Bong and even Erap have suddenly become saints to me. These guys have entrusted their fate to the courts and have been man enough to squarely embrace due process. The Binays? They’re the epitome of what’s rotten in our system. Their devilish belligerence makes me puke!!!”
I totally agree with Val. Watching the messy confrontation in Makati, I can only feel dismay that the Vice President allowed mob rule to happen.
This is a very bad preview of things to come... the disrespect for law and the legal process should send chills down our spines...
The Jojo Binay I know, the patient human rights lawyer fighting the Marcos dictatorship, would have just followed the normal legal process. He would have prevented a scene that’s embarrassing for the country as it was shown on television news that is beamed worldwide, seen even by potential investors and our overseas kababayans.
Jojo is after all, the vice president who wants to be president. It should be beneath him to point a finger at a police officer and threaten him in anger that from now on, they are enemies.
And it is difficult for Jojo’s media handlers to change the story and claim the police was to blame. We saw it all, how the monobloc chairs rained on the police, on television.
They must have belatedly realized the terrible mistake. That’s why Mayor Junjun eventually decided to step down until they hear from the Court of Appeals.
The sense of entitlement of the Binay family is what we don’t need from our leaders. That incident at the Dasmariñas Village gate some months ago comes back to mind.
Come on, Jojo… you couldn’t have changed for the worse that much.
Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is bchanco@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco
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