Cha cha? Get it over with!

It’s cha cha time again! It seems to me that here are our politicians dancing to the tune of their special interests, while the country burns. But it can’t be avoided, so it seems. The current Constitution is crying out for some changes here and there. And even if I think cha cha (or charter change) is not that urgent, maybe we might just as well get it over with.

Funny, but cha cha’s been haunting us ever since we ratified that "Freedom (or EDSA) Constitution". And maybe doing it now will deflect the attention of power grabbers from plotting a bloody coup.

My main beef about doing a cha cha now is the expense of electing and then supporting the needs of 500 or so delegates. There are better uses of money our Treasury does not have than to pay for the upkeep of a con con. We should also be concentrating our attention on economic development. But then again, I doubt if we have the inclination to do that anyway, between now and 2004.

So, let’s cha cha! Let’s start by cutting out the extreme detail of our current Constitution. It is amazing how it touches on things the Constitution shouldn’t deal with. Like this provision on Filipino control over the advertising industry. The ad industry isn’t that important and vital to national well being that the Constitution should pay it special attention. Even the nature and power of advertising is changing fast with new technology.

In fact, I am not sure the constitutional provision mandating Filipino control over mass media makes sense either. I remember the reasons cited for that provision but all of those were rendered academic by the growth of the international communication superhighway. Between satellite television and the Internet, that provision looks stupid.

Even a Tagalog cable movie channel intended to reach its audience in Manila, can and is being broadcast out of Hong Kong. Filipino media owners must have the latest in high technology to compete for the eyeballs of the Filipino audience. The constitutional ownership limitation prevents local media owners from going into partnerships with foreigners that will bring in capital as well as technology.

If we are going to cha cha anyway, it makes sense for the revised Constitution to stay away from regulating specific businesses and just state basic principles upon which Congress can base future implementing legislation. Restrictions embodied in the Constitution scare away capital, local or foreign. That’s one of the more negative characteristics of our current Constitution.

On the form of government, I’m now more inclined to experiment with a parliamentary form. This will save us the trouble and the danger of having more EDSA revolutions. Given our temperament, we may look unstable with new governments every other month but we look unstable now anyway. We also now have the added negative of these EDSA gatherings giving the military more powers than they should have in a civilian led government.

But I’m not sure the regional federal government proposed by Nene Pimentel will work, for so long as Metro Manila is the overwhelming center of commerce and industry. We will just end up having "autonomous" regional governments with near empty coffers. We should have learned our lesson from the local autonomy law authored by Nene. It simply raised expectations from poverty stricken citizens but failed to deliver.

Maybe, we can only afford one experiment at a time. If we experiment with a parliamentary form of government, let’s not toy around with autonomous regional government in a federal system. That might just be more than we can manage.

And one last thing – let’s do a fast cha cha. Once that’s overtaken by the 2004 election fever, all good sense and patriotism will go out the window. Let’s get it over and done with fast.

No PR PR Office

I usually go through the bureaucracy when I need anything from government. I didn’t call Bobby Lastimoso when I renewed my driver’s license. I just lined up like everyone else and sweated it out for an hour or so.

I should have stuck with my rule about doing it the ordinary way when I needed to renew my passport. But I thought I’d use the DFA’s PR office because DFA was my first beat, 30 years ago and I had almost always used the PR office to renew my passport. Trabaho nila yan. Besides the head of the office was a college classmate of my wife. I met him at a Christmas party last December and he seems a nice fellow, if a bit pretentious.

So I had my secretary call up the PR office to make arrangements. The secretary who answered the phone however, was rather rude. My secretary explained the situation and the DFA PR staffer demanded that I get a certification from my editor that I was a legitimate member of the press. My column occupied almost half a page that day. They don’t read the newspapers at DFA’s PR office, so it seems.

My secretary explained that my wife was a classmate of her boss, to which the rude staffer condescendingly asked, if my wife studied in Tokyo or some foreign diplomat’s school. Of course my secretary, who used to be my, and Amando Doronila’s secretary at the Chronicle, was speechless. She is not used to this rudeness.

I told her to forget it and just let the travel agency get my passport. I now have it, thank you very much but no thanks to DFA’s PR office. It looks like they hired an incompetent as a frontliner. To work in a PR office, the basic qualification is to have PR or at least be courteous. You know, like diplomats should be diplomatic.

But I am not really complaining, because I shouldn’t have sought any special privileges even if that is given as a matter of course to journalists who ask for it. Serves me right, I guess. I bring this up only because I think there is something wrong in the hiring policies of the DFA that enabled a PR-less person to become a frontliner in a PR office. The taxpayer gets shortchanged every time someone who isn’t up to the job is hired. And I just paid at least four months worth of income in taxes last week.

My good friend Tito Guingona should not wonder why the foreign office isn't too hot with the public these days. Mix incompetence with arrogance and you have a surefire formula for trouble. I should have remembered that’s the same DFA PR office that accused the Bangko Sentral of being at fault in the passport shortage only to admit subsequently that the DFA failed to place an adequate printing order, after Paeng Buenaventura protested.

They should all be assigned to an Ebola-stricken African country.

Erap’s Justice

Overheard at the Erap rally to celebrate his birthday last Friday.

"Kita mo na, tama si Erap. Pati si Ate Glo aminado na patay na ang hustisya sa Pilipinas."

"Sinabi ni Ate Glo yan?"

"Basta. Action speaks louder than words. Kita mo nga... nagpadala na ng corona si Ate Glo sa Korte Suprema."

(Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected])