No credibility

Customs Commissioner Bert Lina is the wrong person to head Customs for an administration that wants to brag about Daang Matuwid. I want to believe he took on the job to heed the call of public service in his golden years… to pay society back. Bert simply has an unfortunate problem with credibility.

I brought up the question of conflict of interest when it was first announced that Bert would be taking over Customs again. Bert is a very accomplished businessman who made his fortune running many businesses that have something to do with Customs.

He promised he would totally divest from all his conflicted businesses and would never take them on again after he leaves Customs. I have no reason to doubt he did that or is in the process of doing that. But that is rather difficult for the public to believe without a trace of doubt, given those businesses were his life work, that he no longer has any interest in those businesses.

Mr. Lina should make a public report on how far he has gone divesting his past businesses. And we need to know who he divested to. If it is to a close member of his family, then that doesn’t count even if it may be legal. That would make it harder for people, specially those who has to deal with Customs, to believe that he is completely out of his past businesses.

Why is Bert’s absolute credibility necessary for his job? Simply because Customs is reputed to be the most corrupt agency of government. Bert, if he is to remain true to Daang Matuwid, must clean up those Augean stables at Port Area. To do that, he must be credible to his own people.

Credibility is everything. Someone like Bert Lina is watched and tested every moment by his underlings. If they see a crack in his armor, they will laugh off his pretensions for reform.

Conflict of interest can be mere perception but it is still a powerful hindrance to the attainment of credibility. Of course, I am assuming Bert wants to be credible. It could also be that he doesn’t care provided he is able to pursue the agenda presented to him by his appointing powers and I don’t even mean P-Noy.

Even now I hear of business people saying they received advice to retain the services of Bert Lina’s former companies from brokerage to trucking if they want trouble free transactions with the agency.

I want to believe these are all loose talk or even sourgraping from people who can’t do the kalakalan as usual. But because Bert has failed thus far to establish his credentials for credibility, he gets no free pass.

Because Bert Lina is not yet credible, he does not get the benefit of the doubt in the face of controversies like the one about balikbayan boxes. People are ready to believe the worse of him and the agency he heads.

Never mind that the law calls for 100 percent inspection of balikbayan boxes. People are ready to believe the Customs people just want to raise campaign funds for the Liberal Party from the forwarders of those boxes. Or even worse, that they want to pilfer cans of Spam, Levis jeans and Nike shoes.

Indeed, I cannot understand why Bert and his Customs boys even had to talk about doing spot checks on those boxes. They have been doing that anyway. By opening their mouths, they touched a raw nerve among our people. They created their own public relations nightmare, as if the administration needs another one.

The balikbayan box is a cultural icon. Whether the box travels with the balikbayan on the plane or is sent via a consolidator, the box is the symbol of the blood, sweat and tears of OFWs. Inside the box are the pasalubongs expected of any Filipino who has been abroad.

Focusing on the balikbayan box is like picking on the very people who sustain the economy through years of mismanagement over several administrations including this one. It is also seen as nitpicking.

Why pick on lowly balikbayan boxes when 2,000 containers of presumably highly dutiable cargo disappeared from the piers? Customs people have been unable or unwilling to explain what happened up to now.

How dare Customs decry losing some P600 million in duties from balikbayan boxes when everyone knows big time smuggling remains uncontrolled for rice, sugar, flour and luxury cars?

Given their limited manpower and other resources, any sane management person, which Bert Lina is, should have focused attention on the big ticket smugglers rather than penny ante balikbayan boxes.

In other words, Bert Lina should pick someone his own size… the influential smugglers. Give the Juan and Juana dela Cruzes the break they deserve for toiling abroad away from families. Or maybe Bert wants the OFWs to use Air 21 instead of LBC when they send their balikbayan boxes home?

It doesn’t help Bert’s credibility that P-Noy had to eventually order him, under strong pressure from an enraged public, not to open those boxes and just use other means like X-ray to look for contraband.

P-Noy knows how thick skinned Customs people are, he said it himself in one of his SONAs. Indeed, people laugh at P-Noy and Mar Roxas every time they talk about Daang Matuwid as if they succeeded in creating a dent in corruption. If this is the legacy P-Noy wants to leave the Filipino people, he has to be more serious and even hands-on in cleaning up Customs, the poster agency for corruption.

P-Noy can not be absolved of blame from the continuing corruption at Customs. He appointed the very straight Gen. Danny Lim at Customs and the general resigned after giving it a good try. While the general is loyal enough to P-Noy not to talk about his experience at Customs, it is clear that he was disappointed at P-Noy’s lack of support.

Another general, a former AFP Chief no less, was also asked to clean up Customs and I hear that he too is very disappointed and is constantly in conflict with Lina. One blogger reports one conflict is “in relation to shipments recommended for seizure by the Intelligence Group (under the retired general) but were ordered released by Lina.”

I heard the general has written a very telling report, one that names names, and sent it to P-Noy. Maybe, that could be P-Noy’s starting point for a clean-up that he might still be able to carry out between now and June 30, 2016.

Then again, maybe cleaning up Customs is mission impossible. The only way to stop corruption in that agency is to abolish it. With tariff barriers progressively going down and may soon be at zero, the need for a Customs bureau will be gone too. What we may need is a security agency that will screen for prohibited drugs and firearms/explosives or we can outsource that function at loading point. 

But that’s still some years into the future. Right now, P-Noy must make his Daang Matuwid credible and use Customs as his Exhibit “A”.

If P-Noy can’t clean up Customs, he should just shut up about Daang Matuwid. It makes him look silly, incompetent and maybe even a lying self propagandist. And that would make it difficult for people to vote for continuity in 2016.

In the meantime, I hope P-Noy will tell Bert Lina to focus on making his agency honest. They need credibility badly. Right now they are seen as the petty bureaucrats with itchy fingers victimizing the country’s new heroes.

Pinoy talent

Internationally acclaimed landscape architect Paulo Alcazaren had this interesting post on Facebook that raises questions for DOTC:

In the 1990s I won a competitive bid, based on design intent, for the landscape architectural elements of the Changi Terminal 2 Extensions.

Since then, the company, Filipino-founded PDAA Design Pte Ltd., was involved in several projects for the world’s perennially top-rated airport, including the landscape architecture for Terminal 1 renovations, the T-1 hotel pool and garden and the some of the internal landscape areas.

I had a design in the 1990s for a magnificent three-story waterfalls and one of the first vertical landscapes then that involved real plants, but it was ahead of its time and was also value-engineered. Still, it was a great experience and honour to have contributed to this wonderful facility (which continues to improve).

Filipino designers (architects, landscape architects, interior designers, retail designers, graphic designers) do have the expertise to contribute world-class creativity to key facilities like airports, but why are almost all the new terminals being planned or renovated here in the Philippines using foreign consultants?

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco.