'Tis a puzzlement

So exclaimed Yul Brynner, a.k.a. the King of Siam, in one of my favorite musicals, The King and I. I thought the same thing last week when two unrelated messages came into my inbox, one of them involving a government cultural agency whose volunteer work force I happen to be a part of, and the other concerning a writer-friend and academic colleague. What connects both matters is the puzzling way our government sometimes works.

The first case  brought to my attention by people within the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), where I sit on the literature committee  has to do with the overextended tenure of Dr. Vilma L. Labrador, the former and recently retired Undersecretary of Education for programs and projects, as chairperson of the NCCA.

Labrador is a holdover from the previous administration, which managed to get her elected chair in 2007 by the 15-person NCCA board of commissioners, a body dominated by government bureaucrats rather than artists. Her anointment  expressed through a “letter of desire” from Malacañang  came over the protests of many in the Filipino cultural community, who could not understand how and why someone so marginally connected with arts and culture could be entrusted with such authority over the sector.

Indeed, while the law creating the NCCA, Republic Act 7356, provides for an Undersecretary of the Department of Education to represent the agency in the commission, it doesn’t say that that Undersecretary has to chair the commission. Labrador was named chair anyway, for reasons we can only guess at.

But that’s all in the past. Dr. Labrador has served her term  albeit one marked and marred by her faithful support for the dubious proclamation of people likewise close to the Palace as “National Artists.” What concerns the NCCA’s public now is the fact that with her compulsory retirement last Feb. 4, her 65th birthday, from the Department of Education  where she has since been replaced in her old position  she no longer has anything to represent.

Nonetheless, she continues to hold office at the NCCA as its chairperson, on the strength of a July 29 letter from DepEd Sec. Armin Luistro designating her to represent the DepEd seat on the NCCA board. The new education secretary  perhaps needing some oldtimers in the department to help him through the transition  apparently appointed Labrador as a “Special Assistant to the Secretary” upon his retirement.

But a “Special Assistant to the Secretary” is not the same as an Undersecretary, even if they happen to have been the same person at one time or another. As problematic as Dr. Labrador’s election as chair was in the first instance, her clinging to the position now on the excuse of being a “special assistant” in the DepEd is even more anomalous.

Surely the Department of Education does not lack for Undersecretaries to assume the post? The suggestion that Dr. Labrador needs to stay on at the NCCA to conclude unfinished business is silly. As some concerned artists have pointed out in an open letter to Sec. Luistro, “The programs cited as justifications for Mrs. Labrador’s continued representation of DepEd in the NCCA are part of the regular NCCA approved work programs and inter-agency commitments. They do not rely on a single person to be accomplished as the NCCA Secretariat and its various units  including the purely voluntary corps of artists and cultural workers serving in the 19 NCCA national committees and four subcommissions  have been very diligent in their tasks to implement the agency’s programs and mandates. The NCCA should be committed to implement them regardless of any change in its leadership, administration or management. This is the essence of participatory governance where programs are not dependent on anyone’s departure from the agency.”

Sec. Luistro and President Aquino himself should be aware that the cultural community has been keenly waiting for signals from the new administration as to its arts policy, given how the sector has historically been treated as the poor stepchild, always the last to be asked to the table. We might even understand how  with hostage crises and anti-gambling drives consuming its attention  the Palace can’t make any bold pronouncements for the arts at the moment.

But it can take some small but meaningful steps to show that it stands for what’s right and what’s just here, as it has declared in other spheres of our national life. We’ve already seen one such sign  the return of credible, sensible people to the board and the leadership of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, putting an end to the temporary madness in that place. Now Sec. Luistro can go one step farther by listening to the artists  not to the bureaucrats  and doing the right thing by replacing Dr. Labrador with a proper Undersecretary on the NCCA Board, ASAP.

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The other item in my mailbox that intrigued and dismayed me  although this one had a touch of absurd comedy to it  was a lament from my colleague at the English Department and the Institute of Creative Writing, the prizewinning fictionist and essayist Dr. Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, titled “Why Am I Being Hounded by the Office of the Ombudsman?”

Jing, as we call her, is a professor emeritus at UP, and until her recent retirement served as the university’s vice president for public affairs (a job she took over from me in 2005, along with the service Toyota that figures in this story). The VP job  and the forthcoming UP Centennial  required her to work overtime, even on the weekends, to get alumni support for university projects.

It’s a rather long and detailed letter, so I won’t reprint it in full here (you can Google “Cristina Hidalgo Ombudsman” and find it easily; I’ve posted it as well on my blog). Let me just summarize the case.

One Sunday in June 2006, Jing and Lydia Arcellana (AVP and director of the office of alumni relations) had a lunch meeting with a group of UP alumni at the Dulcinea, a restaurant on Tomas Morato.

On September 14 that year, UP received a subpoena from the “Task Force Oplan Red Plate” of the Office of the Ombudsman, directing it to submit the driver’s trip tickets “and all other appurtenant and relative documents authorizing the use of government vehicle with plate no. SET-536 (the car assigned to the VPPA) for the period June 13 to 28, 2006.” Threatening Dr. Hidalgo and Dr. Arcellana with unspecified charges, the Ombudsman claimed that the red-plated car had been seen in front of Tonton Thai Massage on Tomas Morato Street at 3:30 p.m.  

Jing says: “The strange thing is that the accompanying photos (the evidence, I assume) showed the car to be parked in front of  not the massage establishment named  but the restaurant Dulcinea with the sign above its entrance prominently shown. They even got the time wrong. As indicated in the trip ticket earlier submitted, we had left Dulcinea at 1:30 p.m. On the basis of this, my driver and I were being investigated for graft, and for ‘dishonesty, grave misconduct, and conduct prejudicial to the best interest of the service.’” The investigators didn’t bother checking with the restaurant nor the massage parlor to see if Jing, Lydia, or her driver were there.

This matter should have gone to the basket four years ago, but last month Jing received another “order” from the Ombudsman concerning the “administrative case” against her, which curiously remains unfiled.

“I am an elderly academic, with an impeccable record of more than 20 years of public service, and numerous awards, for both my teaching and my writing. I feel most aggrieved.” Jing says. “Given the countless cases of blatant graft and corruption, involving billions of pesos, which seem to be resolutely ignored, why am I being singled out for this harassment by the Office of the Ombudsman?”

Why, indeed? ‘Tis a puzzlement!

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.