Petering out

People often rise to positions of responsibility that simply overwhelm them. At lower levels of management, the same people might have been completely functional and perhaps even impressive. This phenomenon where one gets promoted until one is no longer competent to handle a job well is dubbed not entirely without humor as the Peter principle.

One suspects that there are a lot of petered managers in the Philippines. Often the incompetence is explained by the insistence of successful entrepreneurs who started and successfully developed a company to keep it within the family. Although understandable, the sentiment has been responsible for bankruptcies in companies that initially flourished in education, real estate, automobile assembly, electronics, banking and other areas of commerce in the country.

Managerial skills, most people rightly aver, are not genetically programmed. Where the offsprings are clearly unable to sustain the profitability of family businesses, pragmatic patriarchs turn to other people with the requisite professional skills and have them run the business hands on even as the founding family might continue to exercise control over some aspects of corporate decisionmaking. Another tempting possibility is to expand the ownership and control of the business to allow a bigger public to assist in assuming entrepreneurial risks and, of course, sharing in whatever returns the business might bring.

In the private sector, the market largely takes care of incompetent management. Precisely because the market’s reward and penalty system mostly works like a natural law, the demonstrably incompetent company managers suffer losses. Unless economic performance becomes impregnated with politicized considerations, it is fairly easy to predict that badly-managed companies will fold down and that the relatively more efficient economic ventures become increasingly dominant in a given national economy.

Politicization corrupts the free market’s rule of survival of the fittest. It markedly diminishes the incentive to be more efficient in utilizing the planet’s traditional factors of production. Efficient or inefficient, politicized business companies register hefty earnings in their annual incomes. The managers of these companies never become truly entrepreneurial. As powerful "crony capitalists", these managers gain special assistance from their political overlords. Protected by politically dominant authorities, they gain soft loans, regressive tax shelters, discriminative duties, protected markets for their non-competitive products, exploitative manager-labor relations and incongruous safety nets in the course of their profitable consortium with the national authorities and the latter’s local representatives.

The greatest damage to the nation is inflicted by public officials who have risen to their level of gross incompetence. No area of public governance is secure from their fecklessness. In the legislature and the judiciary, in the police, the military, the Cabinet and other executive agencies, the Peter principle appears to have a most debilitating strangle hold. At the highest levels of officialdom, one encounters public officials who make the bureaucracy look like it is haven for idiots, simpletons and other misfits.

People who are unable to express complete thoughts boldly rise to invoke their privileges in both houses of Congress. Logical thinking seems to be the nemesis of congressmen inquiring into how a completely surrounded Abu Sayyaf could escape their military dragnet. Senators in a hearing on the anti-money laundering act wax eloquent before TV cameras as they grill a Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Governor; speaking from anywhere between three to ten minutes, the most senatorially-petered repeatedly say "What I really mean is . . ." Another senator must ask whether the presidential host in a Malacañang dinner stands convicted if found guilty on one count but is declared innocent of three other articles of impeachment.

A judge who presumably knows the law convicts someone of a heinous crime and then – showing no visible signs of judicial dissonance whatsoever – imposes a sentence other than that mandated by law. Some judges are also quick to issue temporary restraining orders or TRO’s, unaware or unconcerned that they themselves must be permanently restrained from subverting the law.

Some cabinet members regularly pontificate and zealously crusade against sensible measures concerning family planning, women’s reproductive health, overseas Filipino workers, international relations focused on issues of global peace, multilateral trade and other issues of Philippine national security. On any of these concerns on any given day, thoughtful Filipinos are unnerved by outspoken personalities who must have been recruited into public service to show that the Peter principle unerringly works in this country.

If one has any doubts left, one might try requesting some international TV channels to replay what recently Asian national leaders had to say about the war in Iraq. It is not so important in this particular case whether one speaks for or against the war. It is whether a national leader facing a global audience can speak intelligently about this war and not look or sound like her cue cards had been missing or had been badly jumbled.

A petered country cannot possibly govern itself well. Even in normal times, incompetent leaders eventually spell disasters for the nation. In already disastrous times, petered authorities must consider a most patriotic sacrifice. It does not have to be harakiri, as this is not Japan. Something merely approximating its spirit will do, like fading away as that old soldier who never dies is inclined to do.

Come 2004, patriotic Peters will then adamantly refuse to run. Hurrah!